QUEST FOR WHOLENESS: D. H. LAWRENCE'S SHORTER FICTION
fey
Keith William Fraser
B. A., University of British Columbia, 1966
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
Master of Arts
in the Department
of
English
We accept this thesis as conforming to the
required standard.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
October, 1969 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and Study.
I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thes.is for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.
Department
The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT
That one narrows the critically popular quest theme to
one of wholeness does not axiomatically assure a tapered,
pertinent monograph. For that reason I have taken some care
to construct my approach to D. H. Lawrence's shorter fiction with three chapters which canalize Setting, Structure, and
Imagery toward this quest for wholeness. And to attenuate
further, the three essays which connect with each of these
are titled "Landscape and Point of View," "The Whole Story,"1
and "Triangle Versus the Individual Consciousness."
In the case of the first and last, I use two of Law•
rence's own essays to kindle the examinations of certain
short stories and novellas. Chapter I endeavors to relate
the apparent influence of post-Impressionist painting on
the writer's creation of landscape, and to illustrate how
closely point of view allies itself with setting in the
character quest for wholeness. The third chapter recognizes
the difference between structural and concrete Imagery, then
uses the triangle image as an example of the first kind to
show how this image remains antithetical to Lawrence's idea
of the individual consciousness—for him the epitome of
wholeness.
The middle chapter attempts to locate a unique con- ii
tribution by Lawrence to the short story art of the twen• tieth century, and to demonstrate successful and unsuccess• ful quests by characters who attain archetypal scope which lifts them beyond the more naturalistic figures in the author's other shorter fiction©
Of course, character success or lack of it in the search for wholeness remains the purpose in the discussion of each story, regardless of chapter. And what the Intro• duction does, in part, is define the nature of that whole• ness as relates to Lawrence's polemic essays; for the rest, it reviews evaluation of the shorter fiction by the critics. CONTENTS
Chapter Page
INTRODUCTION
I. On Wholeness 1
II. The Critics ^
FOOTNOTES 8
I. SETTING
Landscape and Point of View 10
FOOTNOTES l\S
II. STRUCTURE
The Whole Story 5l
I. The Unsuccessful Quest 51+
II. The Successful Quest 81i
FOOTNOTES 93
III. IMAGERY
Triangle Versus the Individual Consciousness 95
FOOTNOTES 120
CONCLUSION 121
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 122 INTRODUCTION
I
On Wholeness
A few weeks ago I received a letter from a Canadian short story writer of some reputation, who said he used to read Lawrence as a night watchman in a Nova Scotia sawmill in the middle of winter. And later when he visited Eastwood where the author was born, he surprised himself by supplying directions for another visitor after a mere fifteen minutes in town: it seems he knew the village instinctively, as a result of Lawrence's superb ability to render setting in his fiction.
Pew writers in this century have evoked accuracy of place with the passion and delicacy of Lawrence. This "spirit"
(as he called it) includes villages and chrysanthemums, farms and haystacks, mountains and glaciers. In his shorter fiction, as in his novels, he continually underscores the natural world in an effort to balance the duality of modern existence. For him, the twentieth century stressed the mechanical over the spontaneous, the intellectual over the instinctive, and the social over the individual consciousness. Such dualities, of course, saturate his fiction, so that any study of Lawrence must eventually turn to the search by his characters for a resolution of these polarities. And wholeness, or harmony 2
with the natural universe, becomes synonymous with their quest for this resolution.
In almost all his polemic essays, Lawrence repeatedly advocates a new fulcrum for the lopsided human equilibrium.
Because he ultimately favors in these debates, the "fullness 1
of being** (Fantasia of the Unconscious )f I have found certain of them important in my own essays which follow. His brief 2
"The Individual Consciousness v. The Social Consciousness," for instance, seems a kernel essay for both an understanding and rationale of the quest theme. Here the individual con• sciousness—actually the condition of wholeness—presupposes
"one living continuum with all the universe," where there ap• pears no "cleavage" between subjective consciousness (me) and objective consciousness (you or it), rather a unity of self that embraces "naivete* ... innocence ... at-oness.'" But when the cleavage does occur social consciousness results—the principal representative of "the condition of the modern consciousness"—in effect a condition responsible for the unbalance and contrivance in an unnatural world. This social consciousness, contends Lawrence, occurs in one of two ways. The first is the old way of greed or selfishness, when the "me" wants to swallow the "you" and put an end to the continuum that way. The other is the way of nega• tion, when the "I" wants to lapse out into the "you" or the "it," and so end all responsibility of keeping up one's own bright nuclear cell alive in the tissue of the universe. In either way, there is a lapse - from innocence and a fall into the state of vanity, ugly vanity. It is a vanity of positive tyranny, or 3
a vanity of negative tyranny. The old villains-in*. the-piece fell into the vanity of positive tyranny, the new villains-in-the-peace, who are still called saints and holy persons, or at worst, God's fools, are squirming in the vanity of negative tyranny. They won't leave the continuum alone. They insist on passing out into it. Which is as bad as if the eye should insist on merging itself into a oneness with the nose. For we are none of us more than a cell in the eye-tissue, or a cell in the nose-tissue or the heart-tissue of the macrocosm, the universe.
Finally,"art ... is the revelation of the continuum itself,
the very nuclear glimmer of the naive individual." Therefore
(if we may interpolate), when wholeness prevails synonymously with this continuum or individual consciousness, then an under•
standing of Lawrence's art rests fundamentally upon a comprehen•
sion of that wholeness.
In Apocalypsef Lawrence writes that "what man most pas•
sionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison,
not his own isolate salvation of his 'soul'." Hence a relig•
ion which keeps man away from "his physical fulfilment" remains
pernicious to the human need for "connection with the cosmos,
with the world, with mankind, with the nation, with the family."
Thus the quest for wholeness is a search for a new religion,
one necessarily empirical in its nature; consequently my own
aesthetic theories grapple with characters who both succeed
and fail to discover this spirituality in the natural world.
The first chapter moves directly into a consideration of
such a world where Lawrence often creates landscape in a typ•
ically post-Impressionist fashion, a technique seriously
neglected by critics of his shorter fiction. The last two chapters also take account of this world, although under•
standably the examination of Structure and Imagery are not
so directly related to it as Setting. Chapter II delineates
the extent to which Lawrence resorts to traditional structures
and archetypal characters for his shorter fiction, while the final essay correlates a number of stories and novellas in
terms of the triangular structural image, which few critics have recognized as operating so extensively. Of course, none
of the chapters are independents each adheres to the quest
theme, and stories of one chapter are sometimes discussed in
another when these gain by such a doubling-up.
II
The Critics
But why the shorter fiction instead of the novels?
For one thing, Lawrence wrote over fifteen hundred pages of
stories and novellas, enough claims Leavis, to locate him
"among the great writers—not merely among the memorable, k but among the great." If this is true, Leavis1 single chapter devoted to the tales rather mocks his own assertion, 5 6 7 as do other gratuitous nods by Hough, Moynahan, and Draper. 8 9 10 At least Tedlock, Ford, and Sagar, attempt to interrelate
the shorter fiction and novels, thus inferring a balanced ap• proach to Lawrence's fictional oeuvre. Yet only Kingsley W/id-
11 mer has devoted an entire book to the shorter fiction alone. 5
One of the earliest considerations of Lawrence's shorter fiction was made by H. E. Bates, one which sums up a wide• spread attitude to the stories.
In them Lawrence had no time to preach, to lose his temper, to go mystical, or to persuade the reader to listen to him by the doubtful process of shouting at the top of his voice and finally kicking him down• stairs. Lawrence is for once bound to say what he has to say within reasonable, and even strict, limits of time and space. Ordinarily dictatorial, Lawrence is here dictated to by the form he has chosen. The results have little of that slobbering hysteria of the later novels; they are again and again a superb expression of Lawrence's natural gifts, sensibility, vision, a supreme sense of the physical (whether beautiful or ugly, human or otherwise), an uncanny sense of place, and a flaming vitality. Unobscured by hysteria, by the passion of theoretical gospels, these qualities shine through three-quarters of the forty stories that Lawrence wrote. 12
Given Bates's prejudice against the novels, and his desire to make a case for the shorter fiction, he does recognize a unique• ness in the stories. As does Prank O'Connor, who calls Law• rence's representation of the natural world "magical," but who labels Lawrence "a recklessly instinctive writer who as he grew older trusted more to his instinct and less to his 13 judgment" —obviously forgetting such a late work as "The
Man Who Died," closely controlled and cooly judged.
Hough also recognizes the outstanding accomplishment which Lawrence's stories represent, but feels a need to qualify his statement in order to rationalize his own failure to devote more than a few pages to them. 6
... those who say, as many do, that Lawrence's best work is in his shorter pieces have much reason on their side. In sustained realisation, in formal completeness there is certainly nothing to better the best of his shorter tales. But simply to pre• fer them probably implies some reduction in the importance of Lawrence as a whole; by the student of Lawrence the stories can best be seen in relation to the solid range of his longer works.
Conversely, Prank Anion prefers to view the stories "on their merits as stories, and only later in their relation to his other works." He argues "that Lawrence's stories, regardless of their relation to his novels, disclose an original' and significant release of his faculties and that they stand as a special and unique achievement in the art of the short 15 story." But if Amon's essay fails to take much stock of the novels, it also does not allude very often to Lawrence's philosophy.
The Art of Perversityf on the other hand, takes account of the writer's polemic writings in order to apply the span of his philosophical thought to the shorter fiction. For that reason, Widmer's book will probably remain a standard one for some time to come. Despite the occasional jargonistic passage, the book sticks well to its thesis that "perversity ... gives much of Lawrence's work its distinctive being," while asserting that the shorter fictions "constitute Lawrence's
central writings" which place him "at least among the best of 16 the writers of short fiction in English in his time (1910-30)." Whether or not the shorter fiction are Lawrence's central writings, however, does not detract from their collective 7
center in terms of modern masters of the short story*
And whether we need accept the denigration of Katherine
Mansfield's talent by Leavis in order to commend Lawrence's
neglected reputation, still does nothing to bolster his own
failure actually to show us the greatness he claims for this writer's tales in the twentieth century.
By and large, then, the critics acknowledge that the
shorter fiction composes a significant part of Lawrence's
work, and that it deserves recognition. As yet, however,
few of them have made thematic studies which become the
Hggdical avenues to a comprehension of so much literature. FOOTNOTES
1 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (The "Viking Press: New York, I960), p. 212.
2 Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (William Heinemann Ltd.: London 1933), PP. 76l-761i.
3 (The Viking Press: New York, 1966), pp. 198-199.
k F. R. Leavis, D. Lawrence: Novelist (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 195617 P« 308.
5 Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of_ D_j_ Hjj_ Lawrence (Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.: London, 1956).
6 Julian Moynahanp The Deed of Life: The Novels and the Tales of Lawrence (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 196*37.
7 Ronald P. Draper, D.^H. Lawrence (Twayne Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1961+).
8 E. W. Tedlock, Jr., D^ H. Lawrence: Artist & Rebel (The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1963).
9 George H. ForM, Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of Dj. IK Lawrence (Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1963"). 9
10 Keith Sagar, The Art of Dj_ Hj_ Lawrence (Cambridge University Press: 1966).
11 The Art of Perversity; D. H. Lawrence1s Shorter Fictions (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1962).
12 The Modern Short Story (The Writer, Inc.: Boston, 191+1), PP. 197-198.
13 The Lonely Voice (Bantam Books, Inc.: New York 1968), p7~261.
The Dark Sun, p. 168.
15 nD. H. Lawrence and the Short Story" in The Achieve• ment of D. Lawrence, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. MooreTUniversity of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1953), P. 222.
16 i p. vii. CHAPTER I
SETTING
Landscape and Point of View
1
In his appraisal of Cezanne's paintings , Lawrence sug• gests as much about his own artistic endeavors as about those of the French post-Impressionist. That is not to say, how• ever, that Lawrence fails in his attempt to create character, as he believes Cezanne and the rest of the post-Impressionists to have blundered by painting simply cerebral people. At least in the depiction of landscape, Lawrence admits the
Frenchman's stroke in rendering intuitively that which escapes his brush elsewhere, and here it is the two artists seem sim• ilarly successful, whether or not we accept the previous part of Lawrence's contention.
In Qiis) best landscapes (writes Lawrence3 we are fascinated by the mysterious shiftiness of the scene under our eyes; it shifts about as we watch it. And we realize, with a sort of transport, how intuitively true this is of landscape. It is not still. It has its own weird anima, and to our wide-eyed perception it changes like a living animal under our gaze. This is a quality Cezanne sometimes got marvellously.
Lawrence could raise a rumpus about the disproportionate canvases of the post-Impressionists, but he does recognize that they had brought landscape from the "delicious nowhereness" of Impressionism, to ^substance and thereness." And Lawrence 11
shares more with them than he cares to concede. His own paintings, writes Herbert Read, are the products of "an expressionist, an extreme example of that type of artist who seeks a direct correspondence between feeling and re• presentation, to the neglect of the more sophisticated 2 values of proportion and harmony." To a large extent this is also true, of Lawrence the literary expressionist. Like
Cezanne and those artists who followed, he himself attempts to revitalize "the dark procreative body" from which the
Impressionists had "made the grand escape"; in at least six short stories and two novellas he juxtaposes body and land**-. scape in search of that which must connect an individual "with the cosmos, with the world, with mankind, with the nation, 3 with the family."
This quest for wholeness is especially indicative of
Lawrence's characters where the landscape they experience possesses the aliveness of a C6zanne or a Van Gogh, and as• sists in expressing the writer's attitude to the fragmented condition of man in the twentieth century. Convincingly,
Jack Lindsay argues that Lawrence reached his maturity in fiction not as one might expect through the influence of his literary predecessors, but through that of foregoing painters. By his reactions to the Futurists, Lawrence sought "a rupture of the old links that were supposed to hold a man together, to hold man together with other men"; and he looked for "a new concept of unity in which the forms 12
of character-definition had to be broken up and reconstructed,"
Such an insight, finally, is an integral part of "his great power over the spirit of place over the strong and delicate bonds linking man and nature." The attempt, then, to show
Lawrence's integration of landscape and point of view is really an effort to locate the individual search for wholeness
in the modern world where mechanical disintegration contrives viciously against it.
In "The Individual Consciousness v. The Social Conscious•
ness," Lawrence writes that "you can make art out of the col•
lapse towards nothingness: the collapse of the true individual
into the social individual," in other words, the collapse of
that continuum which connects an individual with the universe.
Precisely this collapse occurs in "'The Prussian Officer" (1913),
one of Lawrence's finest short fictions. Here landscape lends
particular emphasis to the orderly who kills his commanding
officer and escapes into a world unreal enough to prevent
recovery of "his natural completeness in himself." The first
paragraph establishes an antithesis between the distant moun•
tain "snow gleaming gently out of the deep atmosphere," and
the "suffocating heat" of rye patches through which the soldiers
plod on a "white, hot road." Introduced as one now able to GU
"walk almost without pain," the orderly appears able to do so
by "staring at the mountains ahead." This immediate counter•
point of landscape and point of view strikes one as artistically 13
right. To keep his mind from the bruises on his thighs, the orderly has discovered an opium, the one to which he becomes fatally addicted. But apart from his thirst and physical pain, he is also suffering from a split initiated by the Cap• tain, (between himself and "a sweetheart, a girl from the moun• tains, independent and primitive." So quite naturally he al• lows the solace of the distant landscape to mitigate the hurt of frustrated love, as well as the pain of bruises inflicted by the sadistic Captain. Metaphysically, of course, the moun• tains invite another point of view, the perverse longing for the negative sort of social consciousness which suggests tran• scendence, but offers merely annihilation; as Lawrence writes elsewhere (around the time of composing "The.Prussian Officer"):
For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains, there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water. And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are bril• liant with timeless immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negation. 6
In the flashback of Part I we discover the implicit sexual
attraction the Captain feels for his orderly, and the length
to which his raging jealousy will propel revenge. It is the
shock of the kicking he administers the previous evening that
stirs to a head the orderly's "feeling as if he himself were
coming to pieces." Yet "to save himself"—serve the two re- 14
maining months before discharge—he must pretend that his
"master" does not exist, and with "all his instinct ... avoid personal contact."
The beginning of Fart II returns us to the march, and
again associates landscape with the orderly's point of view.
That the snowy peaks were radiant among the sky, that the whity-green glacier-river twisted through its pale shoals, in the valley below, seemed almost supernatural.
Also his "fever and thirst" are again intensified by the rye fields "soaked in sunshine." Yet when the company finally halts for refreshment, the orderly does not remove his helmet
like the others, for he wishes "to stay in shadow, not to be
forced into consciousness." Be that as it may, the Captain's
"presence" still leaves him "disembowelled," as though he were "nothing, a shadow creeping under the sunshine." And
sunshine, Lawrence continues to relate to;the Captain. In
the next scene, while the orderly permits the soporific "blue
mountains rising upon the land" to gain hold of him again,
the sight of the approaching Captain in whom we see "concen•
trated all the light of this morning," startles him out of
his drowsiness, into full consciousness. Later, when he re•
turns with the food the officer commands, he finds his master
in a clearing where there is "half-shade," "sunshine and the
flickering shadow of leaves," "gold-green shade," and "splashed 15
light." In this setting the orderly breaks the Captain's
neck.
This immediate landscape serves to externalize the
orderly's inner piecemeal condition, as It continues to do
after the killing, when the orderly rides the Captain's
horse away "from the sun-blazing valley" deeper Into the wood with its "flecked shade" and "bright green rents."
In this setting, significantly, he loses "connection with
the rest of things"; unable to face the reality of his deed,
his quest for the wholeness he once knew becomes a negative
search for that which destroys him. With the overwhelming
emphasis on light and shadow in these last two landscape
scenes, Lawrence seems to fictionalize the visual techniques
of the Impressionists in such a way as to connect with his
own idea that they had escaped from the body by fragmenting
it. The effect is higly successful, especially as it ap•
pears juxtaposed to a post-Impressionist landscape of moun•
tains to which the orderly ultimately turns for wholeness
and redemption. A good example here of what Lindsay dis•
cusses, Lawrence concerns himself with breaking up the old
ideas of defining character, and searching for a new concept
of character unity. That the orderly later finds only frag•
mentation In the mountain landscape—in a sense becomes one
of the "lumps" the writer criticized in the post-Impressionist 16
canvases--does not suggest a similar "hate" by Lawrence for the body; instead it implies his underlying sympathies for those same painters who viewed modern man at odds with his environment, saw him as complete as he could be in a world contrived and less than whole. In a soldier, therefore, on the eve of the First World War, Lawrence picks asfltting character to smash the nineteenth century military ideals that supposedly connected a man with himself, and with the larger community.
In Part III, the orderly's concept of himself as an outsider, fragmented and oblivious to mankind, is really reflective of a singular awareness of his position in the immediate landscape to which he has escaped.
But now he had got beyond himself. He had never been here before. Was it life, or not life? He was by himself. They were in a big, bright place, those others, and he was outside. The town, all the country, a big bright place of light: and he wa3 outside, here, in the darkened open beyond, where each thing existed alone. But they would all have to come out there sometime, those others. Little, and left behind him, they all were. There had been father and mother and sweetheart. What did they all matter? This was the open land.
In this passage Lawrence settles irrevocably in the orderly's imagination both a world of light and a world of dark. In the immediate landscape, with its darkness "growing deeper," the soldier appears "amid" what he regards "the reality,''one. the real dark bottom." But as he approaches the edge of the 17
wood he stops short with fear:
There was a tremendous flare of gold, immense—just a few dark trunks like bars between him and it. All the young level wheat was burnished gold glaring on its silky green. A woman, full-skirted, a black cloth on her head for head-dress, was passing like a block of shadow through the glistening, green corn, into the full glare. There was a farm, too, pale blue in shad• ow, and the timber black. And there was a church spire, nearly fused away in the gold. The woman moved on, away from him. He had no language with which to speak to her. She was the bright, solid unreality. She would make a noise of words that would confuse him, and her eyes would look at him without seeing him.
Not only does Lawrence describe this landscape in post-
Impressionist terms (a landscape reminiscent of Van Gogh's
Cornfield with Cypress). but it reverts his character's point
of view to the world of light from which the orderly has sought
escape. This refugee can only turn from the unreal woman, how•
ever, to the "wonder-light" of the mountains, "not far away,
and radiant."
Behind the soft, grey ridge of the nearest range the farther mountains stood golden and pale grey, the snow all radiant like pure, soft gold. So still, gleaming in the sky, fashioned pure out of the ore of the sky, they shone in their silence. He stood and looked at them, his face illuminated. And like the golden, lus• trous gleaming of the snow he felt his own thirst bright in him. He stood and gazed, leaning against a tree. And then everything slid away into space.
While associated with the world of sunlight, these moun•
tains do not smack of unreality to the orderly, as does the
woman. Pictured with all the "shiftiness" of a Cdzanne land-* 18
scape, they appear beyond reality, "between earth and heaven," and in the end seem "to have it, that which (is) lost in him."
Their wholeness suggests a Platonic wholeness, actually as unreal as the "solid unreality" of the woman in the wheat field: neither can he communicate with the mountains, and his overwhelming desire "to leave himself and be identified with them," leads to the despair of an addict with insufficient opium. "He stood still," writes Lawrence, "mad with suffering, his hands crisping and clutching. Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the grass." In this susceptible condition, the sunlight (explicity linked with the Captain earlier) has, ironically, only to destroy him.
He lay still, in a kind of dream of anguish. His thirst seemed to have separated itself from him, and to stand apart, a single demand. Then the pain he felt was another single self. Then there was the clog of his body, another separate thing. There was some strange, agonised connection between them, but they were drawing farther apart. Then they would all split. The sun, drilling down on him, was drilling through the bond. Then they would all fall, fall through the everlasting lapse of space.
For the second time everything slides away from him, and it
is the last. Fragmented he dies before regaining conscious•
ness, collapsed into nothingness, a victim of Lawrence's
shattered continuum.
Probably the author's most intense statement of the quest
for wholeness, "The Prussian Officer" moves with superb archi•
tecture from the flashback of Part I, through the killing in 19
Part II, to the denouement in Parts III and IV. The move• ment from one landscape to another, moreover, leads to a purposeful juxtaposition throughout the story, at the same time integrating the central character's point of view.
"The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" (1916), on the other hand, has less to recommend it in terms of a similar intricacy and bulk of landscape. Yet point of view does again work in conjunction with setting, here around a farm in England.
This landscape helps to convey the poignant collapse of a horse-dealer's family, and provides background for a love story between Mabel Pervin and Dr. Fergusson.
When the story opens, Mabel's three brothers watch the only life they have known come apart "beyond the dark holly bushes that £separate3 the strip of lawn from the high-road"
—when they witness four horses swing out of the yard for the last time. Meanwhile there are "sloping, dank, winter- dark fields" that stretch "away on the open sides," out back. This external condition is indicative of the internal where both kitchen and stables now are "empty." Responsible for "keeping the home together" since the death of her mother,
Mabel has kept her ownself together by affecting a "brutally proud, reserved" attitude toward the coarseness of the male environment. But the death of her father and the resulting debt has made it impossible for her to provide family co• hesion as well, and now Mabel's task seems finished. Already 20
she has started toward the illusion of wholeness, actually fragmentation and death.
She need not demean herself any more, going into the shops and buying the cheapest food. This was at an end. She thought of nobody, not even of herself. Mindless and persistent, she seemed in a sort of ecstasy to be coming nearer to her fulfilment, her own glorification, approaching her dead mother, who was glorified.
As she walks to the churchyard to visit her mother's grave for the last time, "a grey wintry day, with saddened, dark green fields ... blackened by the smoke of foundries not far off" surrounds her; here the landscape appears an externalization of Mabel's inner sombre condition. Yet
she discovers an inevitable security in the churchyard,
as she has always done: she reaches "a subtle, intimate
connection with her mother" that suggests a perverse
spiritualism, because the normal world remains "far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother." Like the orderly, Mabel escapes the normal world by searching out what she believes to be a whole•
ness—one that stresses shadows and darkness. When she
enters the suicidal pond ("the depression of callous wintry obscurity") from which Pepgusson rescues her,
she becomes "the dark shadow of her black clothing
beneath the surface of the water." 21
Earlier, Pergusson has experienced a momentary regen• eration when his eyes meet Mabel's beside her mother's tomb• stone. And later, crossing "the dark green fields," nostal• gically observing the Pervin home "on the nearest fringe," he detects Mabel "roving across the landscape," "in the green, shallow, soddened hollow of fields." Here the landscape neatly fuses the woman who has previously aroused him in the graveyard, and the same woman who again makes his mind "alive and active." But his vision of her remains as distorted and fragmented as his view of the landscape, for he can barely
"make sure of the small black figure in the hollow of the failing day." Thus, while we realize that Pergusson's sight of Mabel has earlier acted like "some powerful drug" to stir his mind with new life, in the present scene the peculiar way Lawrence coalesces the landscape and the doctor's point of view, allows both his character and us to feel this new life more intimately.
He seemed to see her in the midst of such obscurity, that he was like a clairvoyant, seeing rather with the mind's eye than with ordinary sight. Yet he could see her positively enough, whilst he kept his eye at• tentive. He felt, if he looked away from her, in the thick, ugly falling dusk, he would lose her altogether.
The picture is one primarily of feeling, the essence of post-
Imressionism, and secondly of knowing. Hence, we might apply
to Lawrence what he writes elsewhere of another artist: "He is 22
consciously trying to convey a feeling, he is no longer 7 striving awkwardly to render a truth,"
In rescuing Mabel from her attempted suicide and frag• mentation, Pergusson allows her frank question ("You love me?") to force him into a conscious acknowledgement of what he had unconsciously felt watching her earlier in the external world,
"Yes." The word cost him a painful effort. Not because it wasn't true. But because it was too newly true, the saying seemed to tear open his newly-torn heart. And he hardly wanted it to be true, even now.
Yet in his commitment, Pergusson has managed to liberate
Mabel's life from the unreality of the graveyard—to give it the wholeness of sexual love.
His acknowledgement of love is what Lawrence's men discover difficult to articulate. Despite the Countess Han- nele's repeated demands in "The Captain's Doll" (1921), Alex• ander Hepburn downright refuses to make any such concession, yet gains from her, in the end, an acceptance of his marriage proposal. In this comic novella (as in later shorter fiction),
Lawrence once again juxtaposes man and a living mountain land•
scape in order to highlight the basic disharmony of the human
condition, the one initiated by such social situations as marriage which often do more to fragment than to join. Not
an especially incisive work, "The Captain's Doll" does examine, 23
however, the quest for wholeness as it becomes part and parcel of Hepburn's search for himself in "a new relation• ship with another"—established during the concluding climb Into the CSzanne-like mountains.
After his wife tumbles to her death from a hotel win• dow, Captain Hepburn attempts to avoid all human contact.
He has confessed to his German mistress, Hannele, that he in fact loved his wife, as he once loved a caged bird in his boyhood. Consequently his fragmentation seems irrevocable.
The chief thing that the captain knew, at this juncture, was that a hatchet had gone through the ligatures and veins that connected him with the people of his affec• tion, and that he was left with the bleeding ends of all his vital human relationships.
Yet "a man hasn't finished his life at forty," and so in search of Hannele, he returns to Germany. The doll which
Hannele once sewed in a likeness of himself, he discovers in a shop window, and it serves to symbolize his present
"forlorness" and "isolation." Yet soon It disappears, sold; and when it turns up again, It has become part of a modern abstract canvas, a picture which includes "two sunflowers in a glass jar, and a poached egg on toast." Hepburn promptly purchases the painting, and thus moves closer toward a recovery of himself.
Here Lawrence gets in his licks against the post-
Impressionist style which purposely deformed the body, and 2IL
mocks Hepburn's taste both in his purchase, and later in claiming the canvas "goodiitt- Significantly, Hannele's decis• ion to burn this picture—after she has finally accepted
Hepburn's one-sided terms of marriage—is actually the sym• bolic substitution of romantic, illusory love (a painting is two degrees removed from reality according to Plato), for a less emotional, apparently more complete love. Lawrence advocates the need for a fresh relationship between man and woman—in this case found in the wholeness of a very tradit• ional marriage.
The movement toward this particular wholeness occurs specifically during a climb in the Austrian Alps, after Hep• burn accidently meets Hannele (now engaged to Herr Regierun- gsrat) in Tyrol. While Tyrol possesses the illusion of "ful• ness," the town, according to Lawrence, is really "all ter• rible and devastating." Thus the trip into the mountainous landscape, away from the "magnificent blond flesh of men and women" bathing in the lake beside Tyrol, and from Regierun- gsrat himself (described as captain of a sinking ship), re• presents a journey from friendships that appear ephemeral, to a relationship presumably more conclusive.
The "folded mountains" which Hannele and Hepburn approach,
Lawrence renders in a post-Impressionist fashion. The shift• ing, animal quality he admires in Cezannes's landscapes is
the one he aims for here; in the distance, for example, the 25
glacier seems "cold and angry"; and as passengers in a motor-car which climbs upwards through a "valley of the shadow of death," Hannele and Hepburn eventually disembark to continue their climb toward the same glacier that now appears "to loll like some awful great tongue put out."
Hepburn, an astronomer whom Lawrence has earlier re• ported as desiring "to be high up, because of his stars," now finds the reality of height in this "livid" landscape, loathsome. While the optical illusion of his telescope did not previously force emotion upon him, here the mountains open his eyes, force him into an emotional commitment that leads to his denigration of those who feel "exalted,"
"prancing on mountain-tops." Both his profession of "hate" for the iluplift" of the mountains, and his claim that this landscape exists as "less" than he, leads Hannele to diag• noses his affliction as "megalomania."
But because he gave himself away, she forgave him and even likedhim. And the strange passion of his, that gave out incomprehensible flashes, was rather fascin• ating to her. She felt just a tiny bit sorry for him. But she wasn't going to be bullied by him. She wasn't going to give in to him and his black passion. No, never. It must be love on equal terms or nothing. For love on equal terms she was quite ready. She only waited for him to offer it.
What the landscape does, then, is to bring both their points of view concerning the nature of their relationship, into direct opposition. 26
While Lawrence sardonically undercuts tourism and the sorts of hotels and individuals it breeds, his two characters continue their ascent toward the glacier with its "great paws of ice." Terrified at its prospect, the former army captain approaches the "sweating" "monster" until It becomes "his one desire—to stand upon it," since it is the lot of humans "to go beyond their fear." In presenting the same intuitive truth of landscape that C6zanne offers, Lawrence humorously jux• taposes the glacier as a "grand beast," and "our hero" crawl• ing "on four legs" like a crab across it. This counterpoint serves a dual purpose: 1) it fleshes out Hepburn's character by indicating the extent to which a challenge of this nature prods him--a challenge in whose response he hardens the rigidity of his position In relation to Hannele; and 2) it undercuts
Hepburn's supercilious attitude toward this landscape. Re• quired to sit on his trouser-seat "not knowing how to get off," he is made the more ludicrous when he finally does escape, by stating his preference for "the world where cabbages will grow." Accordingly, the landscape experience for him be• comes both "marvellous" and "awful," and acts as a catalyst for his proposal of marriage to Hannele.
At this point Hepburn's quest to stop up the severed ligatures of relationships since his wife's death, turns into a coy reversal of "popular romances," in which men fawn at the feet of women (illustrated by Lawrence's cameo depicting 27
a girl with a "white cool monster" of a dog on leash—obvious• ly an allusion to the glacier which Hepburn has already walk• ed over—and three admiring men). Hepburn has had enough of that kind of thing with his first wife. Thus his proposal to Hannele refrains from offering marriage "on a basis of love," for all that would lead to is a woman making a doll of him—the thought of which pricks him "like a thorn."
Instead, he desires "a sort of patient Griselda" who will agree "to honor and obey" him.
At the station—at the bottom of the landscape—Hepburn argues that a woman's "highest fate" is "to be loved and shielded as a wife—not as a flirting woman." And, despite her protests, Hannele ultimately consents to such a fate by agreeing to a wedding the following morning, and by her in• tention to burn the picture of the doll. Therefore in the traditional comic resolution we see a classic attitude to marriage evoked, and against a background of Cezanne-directed landscape, a certain wholeness of life obtained, where it leaves the feminine point of view apparently without much individuality. Yet that, according to Lawrence elsewhere, must continue as the road to significant connection: "Love, as a relationship of unison, means and must mean, to some 8 extent, the sinking of individuality." On the other hand
(as he writes in Apocalypse). "to yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be 'free' 28
9 and individual.'* Presumably, in the achieved relation•
ship of Hepburn and Hannele, Lawrence acknowledges that
a strong male point of view should thrive In the tradit•
ional sense if the relationship between modern man and woman is to manifest a viable whole. At the same time, however, the woman should continue to assert her individ•
uality in harmonious juxtaposition.
Even so, Lou is not about to scuttle her individuality
in "St Mawr" (1921+) for the sake of a precarious harmony.
In this longest of his novellas, Lawrence again juxtaposes
landscape and point of view, this time to illustrate how
such a womanly refusal leads to a quest for wholeness as
a result of an unsatisfactory marriage (also the situation
In "The Woman Who Rode Away" and "Sun"). That does not mean that acquiescence to the male point of view is not
attractive to Lawrence's women, but capitulation to any
husband less than a man, certainly is. While Hannele ob•
viously finds Hepburn complete and virile enough, Lou feels
In her husband increasingly less satisfaction—their relat•
ionship now "a nervous attachment, rather than a sexual
love." An artist in the most affected sense, Rico resembles
a "young poser" who, despite the superficial likeness be•
tween himself and the stallion his wife purchases, is^ ac•
tually St Mawr's antithesis: with her husband she senses
"a bluff, an attitude," with the horse "something much more 29
terrifying, and real." The failure of St Mawr's reality to rub off on Rico directs Lou toward a greater dependence upon this horse as a means to the wholeness she desires, and the one she discovers finally in the landscape of North America.
Here Lawrence adumbrates that landscape through the stallion:
Why did he seem to her like some living background, into which she wanted to retreat? When he reared his head and neighed from his deep chest, like deep wind-bells resounding, she seemed to hear the echoes of another darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her. And there she wanted to go.
WhileRico symbolizes "the complete futility of her liv• ing" in England where she (an American by birth) is an "out• sider," Lou becomes gradually aware of a necessity for change.
As she informs her mother, Mrs. Witt, she requires "the wonder back again," or else she will die; at this point "a pure an• imal man" like Phoenix, the groom, represents that wonder.
Ascetic and incomplete, on the other hand, her husband epit• omizes "one of mankind's myriad conspirators, who conspire to live in absolute physical safety, whilst willing the minor disintegration of all positive living."
The structure of "St Mawr" accentuates the landscapes of two countries, both important to Lou's quest for the wholeness which becomes her own in the final scene of the story. The horseback excursion to the Devil's Chair ("one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers") 30
enhances Lawrence's dissatisfaction with contemporary Brit• ain and the kinds of people who populate its upper classes, friends of Rico, who comprise the evil world Lou later intuits.
At length they stood in the place called the Chair, looking west, west towards Wales, that rolled in golden folds upwards. It was neither impressive nor a very picturesque landscape: the hollow val• ley with farms, and then the rather bare upheaval of hills,* 1 slopes with corn and moor and pasture, rising like a barricade, seemingly high, slant• ingly. Yet It had a strange effect on the imagin• ation.
While the landscape allows Lou a pristine awareness, her assertion that modern man does not exist in the manner of his pagan ancestors, simply passes over the heads of her husband and the others. In Apoclajpse. Lawrence alludes to this dichotomy between ancient spontaneity and modern imperceptiveness when he suggests that
perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and personal background were on the whole Indif• ferent. But the cosmos was a very real thing. A man lived with the cosmos, and knew it greater than himself. 10
However^ the modern ego (Hepburn's, for instance) reacts against a concession like the last phrase, or else it never 31
thinks to marvel at anything beyond its own dilettantism
(Rico's, for example). Lou, conversely, experiences the landscape in an intuitive manner which advances her in• sight, as it continues to do in the following scene which collaborates with her viewpoint to become symbolic of the dissatisfaction she does not yet fully comprehend.
The Needle's Eye was a hole in the ancient grey rock, like a window, looking to England; England at the mom• ent in shadow. A stream wound and glinted in the flat shadow, and beyond that the flat, insignificant hills heaped in mounds of shade. Cloud was coming—the Eng• lish side was in shadow. Wales was still in the sun, but the shadow was spreading. The day was going to disappoint them. Lou was a tiny bit chilled, already.
Not even the picturesque landscape of Wales, earlier des• cribed as "crumpled folds, goldish in the morning light," now holds much promise. Yet, significantly, "the Manby group" adores the shadowy, pessimistic view, as does Rico who is puzzled by his wife's distaste for it.
The turning scene in the novella occurs as the horses pick their way from the Needle's Eye lookout, when St Mawr suddenly shies. Rico tugs "viciously" on the reins in ob• vious disgust at the horse's irrational behavior, and manages foolishly to pull it completely over on top of"himself. But riding away to fetch brandy for her injured husband, Lou discovers that a dead snake has caused St Mawr's queer be• havior; and as a result of this observation she experiences an overwhelming awareness of evil drowning the world. Here 32
Lawrence takes some apocalyptic potshots at the ills of bolshevism and fascism, somewhat beyond his character one feels, as he attempts to snare in a nutshell mankind under• mining itself beneath the veneer of respectability. As far as Lou's own life goes, this awareness serves to round out the dissatisfaction she has just experienced viewing the
English landscape from the Devil's Chair and Needle's Eye, and enables her clearly to see Rico and his friends as evil, traitors to the life force that their ancestors once pos• sessed. Unfortunately, the author—more than character- suggests that at this point "the individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself."
Certainly Lou's awareness manifest in this transition scene seems stilted, in a way that her heightened insight at the end of the novella--after another serious lapse by
Lawrence—does not. But the scene does work to focus the heroine's point of view, and to open the way for the American landscape which provides Lou less with a sense of fragmented mankind, and more with the feeling of purely personal whole• ness. Like Phoenix, she too perceives "that country, with its dark, heavy mountains holding in their lap the great stretches of pale, creased, silent desert that still is virgin of idea, Its word unspoken."
But before Lou completes plans for her trip to America, the English landscape continues to work subtlely to complete the dissatisfaction she feels. In a scene which follows the 33
discovery that her husband plans to sell St Mawr to Flora
Manby so she can geld him, for example, Lou stands "at the window, overlooking the wet, close, hedged-and-fenced land* scape" that appears "enclosed" and "stifling." Understandably, her dissatisfaction scrapes across the "whole eunuch civili• zation."
Hence for Lou, the voyage to America assumes an escape from what she finds intolerably "unreal" in England. From the deck of the ship she watches the Isle of Wight "pass shadowy, in a mist of rain ... and with it, her life, going like a clot of shadow in a mist of nothingness." Yet the
"film-setting" of Texas does not afford the kind of realism she seeks either; so leaving St Mawr (who does not reappear in the story), Lou, her mother, and Phoenix journey to Santa
Fe which they find even more intolerable than Europe. Con• sequently, Mrs. Witt retreats to her hotel room, and Lou and
Phoenix set off to visit the ranch Lou ultimately purchases.
Their motor-car ride into the mountainous landscape parallels the earlier one in "The Captain's Doll," but here
Phoenix's effort to lure Lou's favor ends in rebuff; she no longer wishes "to fool herself into thinking that a Phoenix might be a husband and a mate." His life, she senses, is not much different than her husband's, and so she affirms her in• dependence.
"No, no," she said to herself, "I was wrong to ride 31|
in the front seat with him. I must sit alone, just alone. Because sex, mere sex, is repellant to me. I will never prostitute myself again. Unless some• thing touches my very spirit, the very quick of me, I will stay alone, just alone. Alone, and give my• self only to the unseen presences, serve only the other, unseen presences."
What does touch her spirit she discovers in Las Chivas,
a ranch owned previously by a trader and his New England wife
(actually Mrs. Mabel Dodge Sterne whom Lawrence met in Taos),
a place described amidst an aura of "vast and living lands•
cape."
The desert swept its great fawn-coloured circle around, away beyond and below like a beach, with a long mountain• side of pure blue shadow closing .in the near corner, and strange bluish hummocks of mountains rising like wet rock from a vast strand, away in the middle distance, and beyond, in the farthest distance, pale blue crests of mountains looking over the horizon, from the west, as if peering in from another world altogether.
Here the distant mountains (reminiscent of those in "The
Prussian Officer") represent "Paradise." Consequently, the
struggle of the New England woman has been "to make the near•
ness as perfect as the distance: for the distance was ab•
solute beauty." But "while she revelled in the beauty of
the luminous world that wheeled around and below her, the
grey, rat-like spirit of the inner mountains was attacking
her from behind."
This duality of the paradisal landscape, Lawrence des•
cribes for more than a dozen pages, and seriously weakens
the unity of his story; certainly he captures "the animosity 35
of the spirit of the place" which has attacked the ranch and forced its previous owners to give it up, yet it is less integral to Lou's point of view than one would wish.
It might be argued that when it comes to landscape Lawrence does not wish to skimp; that he fears the cliche he believes
Cezanne's later and poorer landscapes to have fallen into
("the very fact that we can reconstruct almost instantly from the few indications Cezanne gives shows what a cliche the landscape is, how it exists already, ready-made, in our minds, how it exists in a pigeon-hole of the consciousness, so to speak, and you need only be given its number to be able to get it out, complete"). Also, if we recall Herbert
Read's words from earlier, Lawrence seems to lack as an ex• pressionist, particular sense of proportion. But neither of
these rationalizations excuse Lawrence's error of judgment,
and in the concluding pages of "St Mawr"--v/hen Lawrence
spells out the precise impact that his landscape'should make—the weakness is not its length, but that too little
of it is perceived directly by Lou.
Lawrence gives her the final word, however, and in the
following passage landscape and her own point of view coalesce
as they have earlier in England. Of course, the strength of her awareness here reflects the fulfillment of her quest for wholeness: the attainment of reality and the individual
consciousness• 36
"There's something else for me, mother. There's some• thing else even that loves me and wants me. I can't tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here, in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, def• initely. It's something wild, that will hurt me some• times and will wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men, bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if you like. I am imbecile enough for thatJ —But it's my mission to keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and had waited so long here: even waited for such as me. Now I've cornel Now I'm here. Now I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me. —And that's how it is. And neither Rico nor Phoenix nor anybody else really matters to me. They are in the world's back-yard. And I am here, right deep in America, where there's a wild spirit wants me, a wild spirit more than men. And it doesn't want to save me either. It needs me. - It craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred, deeper than I am, with a deep nature aware deep down of my sex. It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do that for me."
Obviously, the spirit to which Lou acquiesces represents the relationship she could not find with Rico, understandable
only in the sense of that continuum which allows an individ•
ual rapport with the universe, and explainable in terms of the primeval landscape which Lawrence paints with the shift•
ing technique of the post-Impressionists.
Earlier, in Sea and Sardinia, he defends landscape's in• herent quality:
The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smith• ereens, and all that we think the real thing will go 37
11 off with a pop, and we shall be left staring.
Lou, however, escapes such an experience by avoiding the fragmentation of mechanical illusion, and by recognizing reality in the mountainous setting. But while a woman's
journey into North American mountains continues to interest
Lawrence in "The Princess" (192[L), and "The Woman Who Rode
Away" (192lx)(the latter a story which brings this particular landscape to an apocalyptic climax), heroines subsequent to
Lou are not so fortunate in terms of perceiving a similar reality.
In "The Princess," Lawrence's character possesses atavistic qualities of royalty which her father half madly instills during his lifetime: the ones that infuriate her
American relatives whom she regards as beneath her. Colin
Urquhart also teaches his daughter that other people are demons in disguise; consequently she learns "absolute retic•
ence." But the death of her father alters her view; at
thirty-eight years of age she senses that "she must do some•
thing," and marriage "in the blank abstract" appears the
answer for her sudden emptiness. So she travels with Miss
Cummins to a dude ranch where she encounters Romero, a guide, "aloof, almost imperceptible in the landscape." At•
tracted to him, the Princess insists that he lead her and
Miss Cummins into the prodigous mountains, so she may peer 38
over them "into their secret heart," and "see the wild animals move about in their wild consciousness."
But in her quest to uncover individual consciousness or wholeness, the Princess undergoes an acute fragmentation.
The transition in this story advances from lightness to dark, from the bright fairy-tale world of pseudo-completeness to one of demonic fragmentation. And the landscape plays a key role in this pattern, its external condition responsible for the dualism that the New England woman in "St Mawr" encounter• ed. While Romero remains "a flickering black spot in the delicate pallor of the great landscape," the continual rising and dipping of the mounted Princess seems almost redolent of her past life with its characteristic assurances and un• pleasant experiences. At once she is excited by the pros• pect of the sun-splashed peaks above, and chilled at the
"tangle of decay and despair" that lies "in the virgin forest" she rides through; and, unlike Lou, her point of view in• creasingly allies itself with the second aspect of the lander seape—the negative one.
When a lame horse forces Miss Cummins to turn back to the ranch, the Princess and Romero continue their ascent, until they attain the ridge where the woman's point of view and the entire landscape are fused in an expression of twisted repulsion.
It frightened the Princess, it was so inhuman. She 39
had not thought it could be so inhuman, so, as it were, anti-life. And yet now one of her desires was fulfil• led. She had seen it, the massive, gruesome repel• lent core of the Rockies. She saw it there beneath her eyes, in its gigantic, heavy gruesomeness.
Perhaps it is "the blasphemous impertinence of her own ster• ility," acknowledged earlier by a Roman cabman, that carries her higher above the desert and its ridges, until the view becomes "ethereal and terrifying in its gleaming, pale, half- burnished Immensity, tilted at the west." Here, suspended between two vividly painted landscapes, she no longer feels
"in the picture"--as she has previously in clothes that match the leaves and grass. Enter a demonic world where Romero with his "strange, demon-like watchfulness" rules, increasingly less the available prince, and more an irrevocable evil.
Under the multiplying weight of darkness, the Princess loses contact with the world as she has known it. But un• like the orderly, she has not still the hope of the mountains to appease her loneliness, she has only Romero; and he attempts to destroy her. Gradually he assumes more an expression of the civilized, vulgar world from which she has turned, than an essence of the mountains she will never understand. The account of their struggle reflects both the coldness in the surrounding landscape, and the movement from enchantment to disenchantment. The Princess' loss of virginity is an im• mediate consequence of her unconscious fear of the external freezing condition. llO
She dreamed it was snowing, and the snow was falling on her through the roof, softly, softly helplessly, and she was going to be buried alive. She was grow• ing colder and colder, the snow was weighing down on her. • The snow was going to absorb her.
And when the Princess awakes and requests warmth from Romero, her claim to royalty becomes merely nominal: she has been promiscuous with one whom her father would have called a commoner.
But while her desire to remain unconquered retains for her tatters of a dream world, Romero's detention of her in his mountain cabin continues the "negation" of everything she has taken for granted. And until the Forest Service manages to kill the guide in a shoot-out and to rescue her, she clings desperately to her own aloof spirit. Even that, however, is touched by the madness she later ascribes to her captor—so that in the modern world to which she returns, she remains anachronistic by clinging to the illusion she is still "the Princess, a virgin intact." She refuses to accept reality as her father refused, and thus, despite her marriage to an elderly man, has moved not closer but farther from whole> ness, toward the ultimate fragmentation of conscious illusion.
"The Woman Who Rode Away" possesses a strange fascination that derives both from the landscape and the mysterious prac• tises of the Chilchui Indians. Disenchanted with her mar• riage, the central character senses in the distant Mexican mountains a reality, a wholeness, that escapes her living in
where the ineluctable spectacle of her husband's extracting plant obscures the "great, void, tree-clad hills piling be• hind one another, from nowhere into nowhere," Her husband® like Rico, lacks a sense of reality, but unlike that effete character, keeps his wife "in an Invincible slavery." Her quest for wholeness receives its impetus from tales she hears concerning the pristine practises of the Chilchui Indians, descendants of Montezuma, who inhabit a valley three days ride into the landscape. Her fascination for the mountains goes beyond merely exploring them, to an interest in the natives who apparently comprise the inner reality of what the Princess finds externally gruesome. Reminiscent of her own longing for escape are another woman's words in Sea and
Sardinia: "Oh, God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life— the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine .12 persistence." And so she rides away.
Unlike the scientists who have attempted to study the
Chilchui, she, like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,, suc• cessfully penetrates the indigenous "religions and mysteries."
Unlike Kurtz, however, she willingly accepts her own death as a functional part of her desire to know the savage mind; Kurtz, on the other hand, can only turn from the jungle's inexplicable terror, and die a fragmented and peripheral victim In his re• vulsion for it. Yet she also dies fragmented, because what she evidently mistakes for wholeness (as does the character k2
in "The Man Who Loved Islands") is merely the negative type
of social consciousness which Lawrence despises.
As the woman ascends the mountains, camping out at
night, her destiny becomes gradually irrevocable as the land-- scape clamps itself around her point of view.
Beyond the cottonwood trees she could see, on each side, the steep sides of mountain-slopes hemming her in, sharp-plumaged with overlapping aspen, and, higher up, with sprouting, pointed spruce and pine tree. Her horse went on automatically. In this tight valley, on this slight trail, there was nowhere to go but ahead, climbing.
The three Indians whom she encounters agree to lead her to
their village, and from this point she begins to exult in
the feeling that she is already "dead," as the light fades
from the mountains and darkness descends. The climb takes
her "to the roof of the world," from which she descends three
thousand feet to the exquisite setting of the Chilchui village,
where the Indians make her virtual prisoner until they offer
her as a human sacrifice in the concluding scene of the story.
Meanwhile, the winter landscape and the cosmos neatly assume
the primitive parallels of Man and Woman, White Man and Indian,
until the apparent "mastery that man must hold, and that passes
from race to race" Is perversely achieved in the cave where
the aged cacique stabs the woman—as the rays of the sun
penetrate the shadowy interior. Again Lawrence uses land-.-
scape as a powerful expression of the individual search for a 43
rapport with the cosmos; but this rapport, as we shall see in a later discussion of the story, fails to connect the individual with anything more than her own negation, remin• iscent of the orderly and his unattainable mountains,
"Sun" (1925) and "The Man Who Loved Islands" (1926) are two final stories which also concern freedom and individual wholeness, as the enticements of landscape. In the first story, Juliet's view of life has been compressed inside New
York where she expresses an ascetic fear of the sun (into which the doctors order her for health reasons). Leaving her husband behind, however, she sails from the city's fragmented
"dribbles of light, " toward the full sun of the Mediterranean landscape where she gives herself naked to the natural world.
Her first contact with the new environment reflects her conditioned sense of a large city's constant scrutiny. It appears impossible for her to hide "where every olive tree has eyes, and every slope is seen from afar"; yet she dis• covers a rocky bluff where a cypress tree stands "guardian" for her "on the knoll with yellowish cliffs at the foot."
And the sun becomes her lover as the landscape gradually emerges to afford her a new self-concept.
When, out of the sun at noon, sometimes she stole down over the rocks and past the cliff-edge, down to the deep gully where the lemons hung in cool eternal shadow, and in the silence slipped off her wrapper to wash herself quickly at one of the deep, clear green basins, she would notice, in the bare green twilight under the lemon leaves, that all her body was rosy, rosy and turning to gold. She was like another person. She was another person.
Her surroundings provide an opportunity for the wholeness
she has never experienced as wife to a husband, "like a worm that the sun has never seen." Responsible for a new
point of view aesthetically free, the landscape becomes an
Eden where she refuses "to think outside her garden."
However her husband arrives "like a blot of ink on the
pale, sun-glowing slope," and the story concludes with Jul•
iet' s regret that she must bear Maurice's child, instead of
one fathered by a vibrant peasant she has noticed in the
landscape. But at least she has become intimate with the
sun which Lawrence claims, in the final paragraph of Apocalypse.
must constitute the first step toward wholeness.
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic con• nections, especially those related to money, and re• establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen. 13
"The Man Who Loved Islands'* appears the last story in
which Lawrence allies landscape with point of view in the
individual struggle toward fulfillment. Like "The Princess"
and "The Woman Who Rode Away," it possesses a unique archetypal
quality whose characteristics I shall discuss later. Here it
is more important to understand how Lawrence employs an in- creasingly surrealistic landscape as his hermitic character undergoes progressive fragmentation when his desire to "re• gain Paradise"—the wholeness of the human quest—backfires.
To quote from Apocalypse again, "If you are taking the path of individual self-realisation, you had better, like Buddha, go off and be yourself, and give a thought to nobody. Then you may achieve your Nirvana." Which is exactly what the man who moves progressively to smaller islands does, hoping to discover in these additionally confined landscapes a view of life which is free and exclusively his own. But naturally he fails because his obsessive individualism gradually negates the community in which Lawrence believes the connection with
Wholeness resides. "To have an ideal for the Individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective 15 self is in the long run fatal." Or in Donne's words, no man is an island unto himself. Obviously the individual self in "The Man Who Loved Islands" slowly subsumes the col• lective self, when the increasing desolation of rock and at• mosphere on each physically decreasing island, reflects the man's growing alienation in terms of his collective point of view.
On his first island this viewpoint embraces quite a total community where he resides as "master," in a "semi-feudal dwelling-house," and where the others live virtually as his serfs in their row of cottages. With its hills, bushes, and k6
flowers, the island landscape holds out "a universe" for the
islander. Yet this universality resembles a synthetic brand which he has to purchase with a group of yes-men, like the
bailiff and butlerj maintaining it, moreover, proves finan•
cially impossible. So he settles for a second smaller is•
land where he takes only a fraction of his original staff—
thus shifting farther from, instead of closer to, wholeness.
This new home has "the coldness, the greyness, even the
soft, creeping fog of the sea, and the islet of rock humped
up in it all, like the last point in space." Appropriately,
the islander's point of view narrows, his ambitions recede.
And the ethereal nature of illusion begins to intrude: "his
spirit Q-sJ like a dim-lit cave under water, where strange
sea-foliage expands upon the watery atmosphere, and scarcely
sways, and a mute fish shadow!ly slips in and slips away
again. All still and soft and uncrying, yet alive as rooted
seaweed is alive." In this amorphous state he cannot resist
having sex with one of his employees, but rather than satis•
faction, he achieves only humiliation. The woman's pregnancy
forces him into marriage, and an increasing fragmented con•
dition. Perhaps on a third island, alone, he can attain the
wholeness which has successfully eluded him thus far.
At this stage the landscape of the third island proves
void like himself. It was just a few acres of rock away in the north, on the outer fringe of the isles. It was low, it rose low out of the great ocean. There was not a building, not even a tree on it. Only northern sea- turf, a pool of rain-water, a bit of sedge, rock, and sea-birds. Nothing else. Under the weeping wet western sky.
This shrunken landscape intimates a hermitic point of view: now the islander desires nothing more than to watch the sea,
"and to feel his mind turn soft and hazy, like the hazy ocean." He avoids human contact and sells his sheep, the fragmentation nearly complete because all encounter, he now finds "repulsive."
Finally winter arrives covering the small island en• tirely with snow, so that the totally bland landscape, with the sea eating "at the whiteness of the corpse-like land," prefigures his own death. Here a surrealistic landscape, in effect one ennunciation of post-Impressionism, captures the essence of dream, illusion, and the weird passage of time. The islander struggles with his shovel against this death-like confinement, but in the end is unable to overcome the "great heaping white hills" that "(fume} like volcanoes" to destroy his island and himself. Importantly, Lawrence arrives full-circle with this scene: the orderly's mountains have returned errupting, yet even more lnacessible to an is• lander who suffers in "snow-sleep" imagining to himself, "It is summer." Again the landscape has become largely respons• ible for the character's fragmented condition—his abbreviated, illusory point of view; and certainly what Lawrence writes in one of his essays: "Life is not a question of points, but 16 a question of flow. It's the flow that matters," has par• ticular relevance for an understanding of the islander's in• appropriate lifestyle, and the parable of his lost reality which reflects modern man's fleeing vision of totality.
Using his pen like a paint brush, then, Lawrence shapes verbal settings which link axiomatically to character points of view. Perhaps more than any other recent writer, he af• firms an interrelationship of the arts for heightened rep• resentation, of the human experience: in his case the recur• ring quest for wholeness. Poet, dramatist, novelist, Lawrence was also painter—not only of actual canvases—but of imag• inative landscapes in his shorter fiction. FOOTNOTES
1 "Introduction to These Paintings." Phoenix, pp. 55l- $Qk.
2 ^Lawrence as a Painter," Paintings of D_j_ H. Lawrence. ed. Mervyn Levy (Cory, Adams & Mackay: London, 196li), p. 63.
3 Apocalypse, p. 198.
"The Impact of Modernism on Lawrence," Paintings of D. H. Lawrence, p. 52. (MarkSchorer, "Lawrence and the Spirit of Place " A D^L Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore ((Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 1959)), pp. 280-29ii, also discusses the spirit of place in Lawrence's fiction, and suggests the basic polarity "be• tween natural place and natural place corrupted by un• natural circumstance.")
5 Phoenix, p. 763.
6 Twilight in Italy (William Heinemann Ltd.: London, 1916), pp. 7-8.
7 Twilight in Italy, p. 15.
8 • "S- 9 p. 196. 10 p. I4.I. 11 (William Heinemann Ltd.: London, 1956), p. 55. 12 p. 26. 13 p. 200, Ik p. 197 15 Apocalypse, p. 195• 16 "Do Women Change?", Phoenix II, p. 5^2. CHAPTER II STRUCTURE The Whole Story It is not too uncommon an assumption that the modern short story evolved from two structural sources: the tradi• tional beginning-middle-end epitomized by Maupassant, and the slice-of-life represented by Chekhov. While Katherine Mansfield appears most to resemble the Russian author among British short story writers, Kipling comes closest to Mau• passant. Lawrence, on the other hand, seems harder to place, not because he typifies the middle ground (whatever that might be), but because his highly characteristic style tempts one toward generalization about his structure, which proves fairly traditional. That does not imply, however, that he did not use this structure in an original way; were I asked for a kind of story most typically Lawrencian, my answer—for lack of a more suitable name—would be the Whole Story. Such a story manifests a beginning-middle-end, but includes traits of the parable and/or fairy-tale which Law• rence coalesces to create a particular short fiction uniquely his own in recent British literature. Occasionally, characteristics of the Whole Story crop up elsewhere in his shorter fiction, but they lack a purposeful 52 integration which directs structure toward a particular effect. To my mind, Lawrence's Whole Story infers basically a double concept: 1) its structure is such that within the limits of the tale, space and time are so extended as to al• low an archetypal character to evolve—that is, Lawrence aims at a total, complete, or whole picture that presupposes a kind of apocalyptic impact; 2) the Whole Story pays par• ticular attention to the quest for wholeness, because the journey motif makes that its universal theme. This sort of story differs from the parable in length and detail, and from the fairy-tale in its use of naturalism. Yet the Whole Story denies naturalism to the extent that it stretches toward myth, and the greater this denial, generally the more overt the use of symbol. As a result none of the following stories are "whole" in quite the same sense. But, as suggested, the Whole Story does employ attributes of both parable and fairy-tale by ranging the spectrum between them, at the same time color• ing language through its own prismatic nature. Here, for instance, are opening sentences from some of the seven stories which follow in discussion: "There was a man who loved islands." "They were true idealists from New England." "There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck." "There was a peasant near Jerusalem who acquired a young gamecock...." In every example the passive construction begins the story in a 53 simple, direct fashion reminiscent of a Biblical story warming up. But Lawrence nurtures this tone, not because of the Christian didacticism it suggests, but because the choice of words carefully predetermines a conventional structure for his own didacticism which extends toward myth rather than conventional religion—toward romance (fairy-tale) as well as didacticism (parable) for inspirat• ion. Thus this tone is conventional in the sense of tradit• ional form, but not in the modern short story where it ap• pears refreshing and original. With the exception of "England, My England" (1915), the other half dozen Whole Stories which Lawrence wrote are all later ones, written in light of his past experience, amidst the flux of his own quest in the wandering years, 1921L-1928. By then quite mature in terms of his own philosophy, Lawrence we see as interpreter, teacher, prophet—as well as fiction writer—in his instinctive realization of the structure I am proposing. The discussion of the first six stories which follow, reveals unsuccess as it relates to acquired wholeness, while discussipn of the last, "The Man Who Died," illustrates the only successful quest by character (the artistic merits of each story, of course, are not concomitant with a success• ful^ quest) .» I The Unsuccessful Quest The islander, as we have seen, fails to achieve ful• ness of life becase he embodies a lifestyle directly op• posed to the association with the human community Lawrence advocates in Apocalypse. The structure of "The Man Who Loved Islands" permits a clear delineation of character, carefully marked off in sections corresponding to the three decreasing islands, and the three increasing states of human disillusionment« The landscape, as suggested earlier, be• comes gradually surrealistic, so that in terms of fantasy this particular Whole Story moves systematically away from the natural world, into another sphere that allows the story's theme maximum effect. Never does Lawrence hold back the story's direction nor its intention; he prefaces the begin• ning of the first island's decline with the following sen• tence: "But under all this, things were not well." And when a cow falls over a cliff one morning and dies, the author quite openly declares its fall''"symbolic" of both the island and the disenchantment to follow. The story itself does not attempt to hide its didactic purpose. After it introduces an anonymous man who desires an Island in order "to make it a world of his own," the second paragraph unashamedly states: 55 An island, if it is big enough, is no better than a continent. It has to be really quite small, be• fore it feels like an island; and this story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can pre• sume to fill it with your own personality. Lawrence then likens an island to "a nest which holds one egg, and one only. This egg is the islander himself." The author proceeds slowly, feeding us the Islander's age (thirty- five), and the length of lease the man acquires on his first island (ninety-nine years). He contrasts his character with Abraham who desired numberless offspring (who therefore could never acquire fulfillment on an island), and he explains that the present island is not a romantic one of the South Seas, but one rather "quite near at home." Thus in understating the island's archetypal connotations, Lawrence actually heightens them, so that the Whole Story qualities he seems to aim at, appear nonchalant and unaffected. Also, by des• cribing the island's physical features realistically, he strengthens his case against the islander who begins to lose his sense of reality through his increasing desire tosisee this place as $a®rainute world of pure perfection, made by man himself." In accordance with the nature of the Whole Story, linear and spatial characteristics receive full extension. The pas• sing seasons are described slowly and in detail: In early spring, the little ways and glades were a 56 snow of blackthorn, a vivid white among the Celtic stillness of close green and grey rock, blackbirds calling out in the whiteness and their first long, triumphant calls...• Followed summer, and the cow• slips gone, the wild roses faintly fragrant through the haze.... And then the sea-fog went, it was au• tumn, the oat-sheaves lying prone, the great moon, another island, rose golden out of the sea, and rising higher, the world of the sea was white..,, and winter came, dark skies and dampness and rain, but rarely frost. The islander has still not merited attention; Lawrence con tinues to address himself to "you": But once isolate yourself on a little island in the sea of space, and the moment begins to heave and ex• pand in great circles, the solid earth is gone, and your slippery, naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world, where the chariots of the so- called dead dash down the old streets of centuries, and souls crowd on the footways that we, in the mo• ment, call bygone years. The souls of the dead are alive again, and pulsating actively around you. You are out in the other infinity. It is this infinity, however, this recognition of the past, which makes the islander "uneasy." Therefore to avoid "any more of this sort of awareness," he hastens to focus his attention upon the Island "by spending money." Here we dis• cern the nemesis of modern man who would deny his past for the sake of "Paradise" in the present; without roots he can never grow, become whole. Nevertheless the islander estab• lishes himself as master in a medieval house, as if mocking a past style of life by pursuing it to the core he really 1 cannot stand. Peopled by hirelings, and quite apart "from 57 the great outer world," the island possesses an idyllic facade: "There were Jersey cows, tinkling a slow bell, among the gorse.T? There was a call to meals at midday, and the peaceful smoking of chimneys at evening, when rest descended." And in the kind of simple tone which the Whole Story espouses, the islander's wisdom and status are established: "He treated his guests royally, his ser• vants liberally. Yet he was shrewd, and very wise. He never came the boss over his people. Yet he kept his eye on everything, like a shrewd, blue-eyed young Hermes." All of which Lawrence effectively undercuts as the story pro• gresses. It is doubtful whether any of them ^servants]] really liked him, man to man, or even woman to man. But then it is doubtful if he really liked any of them, as man to man, or man to woman. He wanted them to be happy, and the little world to be perfect. But anyone who wants the world to be perfect must be careful not to have real likes or dislikes. A general goodwill is all you can afford. The sudden transition from enchantment to disenchantment happens overnight, a characteristic of the Whole Story in which sharp linear connections occur as ingenuously as spatial ones. Moreover, misfortune does not appear an isolated phen• omenon, rather a ubiquitous one: "A man broke a leg, another was crippled with rheumatic fever. The pigs had some strange disease. A storm drove the yacht on a rock. The mason hated the butler, and refused to let his daughter serve at the house." 58 Hence the islander's hubris, his paucity of insight, has met the avenging "invisible hand" which strikes with "heavy malevolence." The island itself assumes demonic attributes, and its previous apparent harmony recurs only spasmodically. Further, the islander discovers that his staff has cheated him, that his debits far outweigh his assets. Consequently, the fourth year finds him on the mainland attempting to sell the island, "as a man who wants a divorce at any cost." In the middle of the fifth year, finally, he sells. However he has not lost faith in the possibility of ful• filling himself in a microcosm where he retains his status as master. Yet a second island proves once again the foolishness of that presupposition. On this smaller island the experience of even a few serving people forces him into a complete aban• donment of society, into the growing denigration of his self. Naturally, the farther away from the larger world he travels, the more remote becomes the ancestral awareness which he has dismissed on his first island; and for a Lawrencian character this dismissal courts destruction (one must feel the present through the sense-knowledge of the past; when modern man denies this he is already less than whole). Thus the is• lander who takes up residence where there reside "no human ghosts, no ghosts of any ancient race," finds "no longer a 'world'," but instead "a sort of refuge." 59 For a time he enjoys Illusory contentment. He spends most of his days in a study working indolently on a manus• cript cataloguing mythological flowers. But cut away from his imaginative roots, he experiences encroaching uncertainty about the ideal he seeks, and the Whole Story is careful to allow us this intuition--or lack of it: "The islander said to himself: 'Is this happiness?' He said to himself: 'I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. -Yet it seems to me I am happy.'" The repetition evident in this passage contributes to our own perception of the Islander's amorphous perspective, because his self postulation is the archetypal one which he tries to answer without the awareness of anything but his own individualism. As a result, he confuses "the soft evanescence":;.of "gossamy things," that which most closely parallels his own position, for what is real or "permanent." Time, moreover, passes in the characteristic fashion of the Whole Story, while he re• mains unconnected with every season. Spring brings sexual encounter with Flora, one of his servants. But the islander does not enjoy it, and the effort he exerts to satisfy himself only succeeds in destroying the tenuous existence that he has seemed to take pleasure from— on this second island, aloof and alone. "Shattered and full of self-contempt" he sails to the continent, until word of Flora's pregnancy reaches him. Simultaneously, of course, 60 the story's second sharp linear connection occurs, which portends Part III of the story—for the islander the pos• sibility of another island: "At this very moment it hap• pened there was an auction of islands. He got the map3, and studied them. And at the auction he bought, for very little money, another island." And while the islander mar• ries Flora, he soon leaves her for this new possession, un• willing to assume responsibility, and unable to recognize the source of his recurring disenchantment. On his first island he could not assume responsibility for his money, and on a second island for his wife. Therefore, Lawrence writes, "He went straight north, to prepare his third is• land." Here he cannot assume responsibility even for him• self. His movement, we notice, has taken him from lord to husband to hermit, and in each role he discovers himself incapable of jurisdiction. On the first island the hired help cheats him, on the second a strong-willed wife usurpts him, while on the third his own fears overwhelm him. Here, quite apart from people, he enjoys his dozen sheep. But presently he sustains shock at "the sound of his own voice," and the last vestiges of idyll, the sheep, commence to dis• may him with their "raucous baa." Hardly part of a pastoral setting on this rocky island, these sheep he finds "degrading." 61 So he sells them, now left without even the excuse of Gul• liver who preferred horses to humans: "What repulsive god invented animals and evil-smelling men? To his nostrils, the fishermen and the sheep alike smelled foul; an un- cleanness on the fresh earth." The seagull which often struts before the islander's hut—with "three very distinct white dots" on its black feathers—Lawrence acknowledges as "portentous, he had a meaning." Ever obvious in its use of symbol, this Whole Story abruptly declares, "then the bird came no more"— with the result that all the birds of the island leave 2 mysteriously. And subsequent to this omen of the dis• appearing natural world, Lawrence continues with such tran• sitions into the surrealistic world as these: "The days short• ened, and the world grew eerie." "The dark days of winter drew on." "Time had ceased to pass." "The sun shone no more." "During the night there was a great storm." The final section of "The Man Who Loved Islands" climaxes as the apocalyptic impact gains its strength from the third illustration of the lesson which the story's second paragraph proposes. Here the islander's intention to achieve wholeness within himself proves particularly selfish and misdirected, when the confessed intention of the story is not only real• ized, but realized within a structure which allows for both simplicity of tone and a fecundity of detail. Particularly 62 effective, the cosmos lends its surrealistic touch, and the islander fades out—not into the proverbial sunset—but into the mouth of another type of dying day: "Prom far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him." He achieves no insight because he has never grown; instead it is the story, its particular structure, that informs our perception of this character's increasing predicament and his final fragmentation. A. second story, "Things," tells the tale of two "true idealists" from New England who pursue a circular journey from America to Europe to America in their idealistic pur• suit of wholeness through beauty; the story itself attests to the foolishness of acquiring beautiful "things" for their own sake, and the equal futility of believing that a setting may provide individual fulfillment without, first, instinctive convictions of its occupants. This story is a slight one, for Lawrence appears interested in treating the quest theme more with sarcasm than compassion. Moreover, for all the travelling of his two characters, he does not take time to establish much in the way of setting, the sort which des• cribes "The Man Who Loved Islands," "England, My England," "The Princess," "The Woman Who Rode Away," and "The Man Who Died." Certainly such a lack denies this story the originality 63 of the others, although "The Rocking-Horse Winner" lacks; the same sensuous setting, but achieves a remarkable orig• inality with a unique journey motif. Overall,"Things" sadly misses the excellence which marks the other Whole Stories, but does remain a copy of the type, however much its characteristics appear off-handed, and lack genuine apocalyptic impact. Here the husband and wife emerge as sorts of Every- people because the narrative tone deliberately cultivates a parabolic context. Their name is Melville—in the best American quest tradition—and their one goal "is to live a full and beautiful life." "Therefore," Lawrence writes, "the two idealists, who were married in New Haven, sailed at once to Paris: Paris of the old days." Both the spatial and linear connections are sharp; Lawrence does not take time out as he did in the early part of "The Man Who Loved Islands" to blur them. Our idealists were frightfully happy, but they were all the time reaching out for something to cotton on to. At first, Paris was enough. They explored Paris thoroughly. And they learned French till they almost felt like French people, they could speak it so glibly. Disillusionment sets in, however, as it did for the islander; because of French materialism and cynicism, the two idealists decide on a move to Italy, their idealism still much intact. There they pursue the teachings of Buddha, hop- 61+ ing "to eliminate from their own souls greed, pain, and sorrow," as well as these same evils from the world itself. But their dream of a perfect universe slowly sours as the war makes obvious to them the fatuity of their crusade. "The beanstalk of 'Indian thought'," states the author sar• donically, "had given way before Jack and Jill had climbed off the tip of it to a further world." Consequently, they are now less certain "about the fullness of their lives." The years pass quickly; a decade after the outset of their quest, they decide upon a return to America. Naturally the idealists bring back their "things"—accumulated fur• niture they have adored excessively for the sake of an in• herent "beauty" that has largely faded. These they are forced to lock in a warehouse (where they become "shabby and wretched"), because their new home in New York, a two-roomed flat, does not allow them freedom to decorate. Freedom, of course, Is Erasmus Melville's excuse for turning down a job in the scholastic world, and for moving west with his wife, into a mountain cabin. But the drudgery of primitive living clashes with their idealism; so when a millionaire friend offers them a cottage in California, they promptly scurry there "catching at new vine-props of hope." The Pacific holds out the freedom which they have so long sought, but "it isn't good enough"'7' because it threatens their idealistic souls. Therefore, nine months later, "with a slight hole in 65 their material capital" (like the islander), they return to New England to attempt European travel once more. This time the old world is "a complete failure," a ""mis• erable, dirt-eating continent." So with their idealism ir• revocably fragmented, they revert to America and the academic world of Cleveland University, where Erasmus, now forty, agrees to teach European literature. On this final meta- phoric island all idealism has vanished, and "a queer, evil scholastic look of pure scepticism" descends upon Erasmus* countenance, a result of a thirteen-year quest. An inability, or unwillingness, to compromise has led the idealists full- circle, with nothing to show but those "things" that cons• titute their nemesis. For all its brevity,and sarcasm, then, the story does latch on to a universal theme, by weakly em• bodying characteristics of the Whole Story. A much longer and more significant story is "England, My England," which pictures both man and country stirring in the unpleasant light of the twentieth century toward disil• lusion and fragmentation. The structure of the story stresses linear and spatial extensions, while the character, Egbert, evolves as one whose quest for wholeness (unsuccessful again) values freedom from responsibility as an ultimate fulfillment. With its extended flashback and subsequent events centering around the paradisal Crockham Cottage, the story accents a linear extension (more than ten years), before!:the spatial shift 66 occurs, and Egbert travels from England to the continent where he dies in war. Such typical sentences as the fol• lowing mark the passing years, the building-up of detail into a structural Whole Story: "Well then, into this family came Egbert." "Then of course children came: a lovely little blonde daughter with a head of thistle-down." "And as the years passed, the lightning cleared the sky more and more rarely, less and less the blue showed." "So a fortnight passed by, and the child: was feverish, and the knee was more inflamed and grew worse and was painful, pain• ful." "Followed a dark and bitter time." nAnd Joyce sub• mitted, week after week, month after month, to the tyranny and pain of the treatment." "And then the Great War broke out." So the story progresses, from Egbert's marriage to Winifred Marshall—from the beginning of voluntary finan• cial dependence upon her father—through their child's ac• cident which lames her for life, to the story's climax. A large amount of naturalistic material precedes Egbert's journey to the continent, part of Lawrence's in• tention to fashion an apocalyptic moment that demands as complete and universal character as possible. One must consider along with the fusillade of realistic detail, the obvious sort of archetypal Implications Lawrence seeks to create, especially that one relating the idyllic Crockham to Eden. The peculiar nature of Lawrence's Whole Story pre- 67 supposes a complete honesty, a giving-over to as much detail needed in order to explain the relationship of character to Man himself. Seen in this light, Lawrence's moralizing ap• pears less annoying and more integral to the parabolic and conversational nature of the story. In "The Man Who Loved Islands" the didacticism does not intrude because Lawrence does not attempt to sneak it in: so too in "England, My Eng• land," where one's initial impulse suggests a comparison be• tween Egbert and the islander, both representatives of modern man and his drift toward disintegration. Yet in a number of ways, both characters are fundamentally different. The islander avoids consciousness of the past, and assumes, at first, responsibility for a self-supporting island; Egbert, on the other hand, nurtures the past, and evades the duty of providing for his family (he prefers to let his father- in-law furnish him a home and allowance). About the time the islander decides to smother all his responsibility and move alone to a third island, Egbert elects to embrace a kind of willful amenability by giving up his isolation and enlisting in the army. And while Lawrence seems not to hold the is• lander in any favor, he does imbue Egbert with some qualities he himself admires: a strong feeling for the past, a hatred for the world of commerce and war. What Lawrence would crit• icize in this character, however, is the misdirected nature of his quest for wholeness. A heart "hard with disillusion" results when Egbert refuses to connect with anything more 68 than dilettantism, declines "to give himself to the world," and thus remains a fragment. In the first scene of the story we see Egbert working but unable to cut a straight path from the edge of the gar• den on to the common. His puzzlement is understandable when Lawrence associates his character's "resistance" to continue, with a strong attraction for the paradisal qualities of the garden and the past, and his reluctance to carve out a disc• reet ion beyond that retreat. Ah, how he had loved it'. The green garden path, the tufts of flowers, purple and white columbines, and great Oriental red poppies with their black chaps and mulleins tall and yellow; this flamy garden which had been a garden for a thousand years, scooped out in the little hollow among the snake-infested com• mons. He had made it flame with flowers, in the sun- cup under its hedges and trees. So old, so old a place I And yet he had re-created it. The past tense in the first line already suggests his dis• satisfaction with the present which seeks to disrupt the idealism that evidently once was his and Winifred's in the cottage given his wife by her father. And one of the first things the story does is remind us of the former magic of this cottage ("it seemed to cast a spell on the two young people"), by implicating the reader in the ancestral pas• sion that the house has known in the past ("You could not be In the dark room for an hour without the influences com• ing over you.") The Eden made possible by the continuing 69 support of Egbert's father-in-law, moreover, seems to that gentleman "a chapter of a living romance": Godfrey Marshall does not appear to mind his son-in-law's refusal to "come to grips with life," because that refusal bespeaks a con• tentment over which he himself presides as an archetypal father, carrying "the old smoky torch of paternal godhead." This is the torch Egbert rejects for himself, even after his own family has acquired the same dimensions as Godfrey's (three daughters). Before his children arrive, however, Winifred finds him perfectly acceptable as a hus• band, because, as Lawrence declares, "neither yet realised the difference between work and romance." And although Egbert performs his married role chiefly as an "amateur," his wife does not worry because she can depend upon her father "in all the serious matters." Yet the birth of her first child initiates a shift in Winifred's attitude toward her husband—barely discernible at first, but increasingly apparent as he refuses to work for a living. As in "The Man Who Loved Islands," Lawrence seems de• liberate in his attempt to achieve a maximum impact by af• fecting a minimum of sophistication. In "England, My Eng• land" he approaches that end througtr both the occasional jux• taposition of the conventional parable (for instance, the one Winifred's mother recites to her about the destiny of the lilies of the field), and the irony which his casual frankness 70 often renders. As Egbert (the comic name of a past English sovereign) continues to begrudge any responsibility, Lawrence is led to remark: "Well, you can bring an ass to water, but you cannot make him drink. The world was the water and Eg• bert was the ass. And he wasn't having any." Or when Eg• bert neglects his father-role, advocating only a fatuous liberty, the author writes: "Poor Winifred was like a fish out of water in this liberty, gasping for the denser element which should contain her." Besides his casual obviousness, however, Lawrence also directs his tangential moralizing to the simplicity he seeks; hardly ironic, he displays the kind of didacticism that some might well find irksome when viewing the story simply as a piece of naturalism, but less so when perceiving the author's effort to write of modern morality within a traditional, parabolic structure. Certain passages relating to Godfrey Marshall qualify here. What eventually interrupts the story's flashback is a manifestation in the present, of the consequence of Egbert's irresponsible role as father (allowing his children their own way) In the past. The story has begun with his daughter's petulant cries to her nurse, and continues in the present some dozen pages later, with the execution of her threat to run out where there are snakes; she falls and cuts her knee on the sickle her father has left lying about. Consequently the following scenes which key on Wojce serve (a) to illus- 71 trate the extent of her precocity as a product of a liberal upbringing; and by her ultimate need for a permanent leg brace, (b) to suggest the lameness of English offspring who are products in the modern world of an idyllic back• ground that paradoxically implies archetypal obedience but breeds instead insouciant disrespect. As Winifred and her children transfer residence to London (near Joyce's nursing home), Egbert begins to ex• perience the complete futility which bites through his heart "like some slow, torpid snake." Gone is the Eden he once knew at Crockham: now his clothes are torn, and he wanders "from place to place, friend to friend," only infrequently visiting Winifred. As he becomes similar to Erasmus Mel• ville, he reflects an "Ishmael quality," "annulling the whole convention of the domestic home" in his quest for freedom and wholeness. What replaces idyllic England for him is British industrialism, whose preference over German militarism he never acknowledges, but enlists nonetheless in his country's fight against it. In so doing, he abdicates from any personal control, and acquiesces to what amounts, he believes, to sub• jugation by his inferiors. Unfortunately his choice repre• sents a negative one, and he remains anachronistic in a modern world, unsuitable as a soldier because his sensibili• ties sustain degradation. He returns periodically to Crock- ham, but the ideality it once symbolized fails to conjure 72 anything but fleeting memories; and those memories, finally, are what he rejects at his death, fragmented and alone on the battlefield, somewhat reminiscent of the orderly in "The Prussian Officer." Better the agony of dissolution ahead than the nausea of the effort backwards. Better the terrible work should go forward, the dissolving into the black sea of death, in the extremity of dissolution, than there should be any reaching back towards life. To forget! To forget I Utterly, utterly to forget, in the great forgetting of death. To break the core and the unit of life, and to lapse out on the great darkness. Only that. To break the clue, and mingle and com• mingle with the one darkness, without afterwards or forwards. Let the black sea of death itself solve the problem of futurity. Let the will of man break and give up. Hence, the structure of "England, My England" brings both character and reader from an awareness of the natural world to one apocalyptic in terms of modern man misplaced, and his country misdirected. And if this story gains its impact from Egbert's failure to reconcile himself to a mech anical world, then "The Rocking-Horse Winner" acquires its force from the failure of another archetypal protagonist, who accords himself too intensely to the same worldsandy dies a similar fragmented victim. Paul's quest for wholeness arises from a desire to see his family somehow more cohesive, free from the repetitive cry of their haunted house which echoes like an axe on any family interaction through love. That "There must be more 1 73 money!" Paul Instinctively recognizes as a symptom of his mother's failure to love her children, and a consequence of her luckless predicament which she increasingly cul• tivates as the story progresses. Consider the incantation of the opening lines. There was a woman who was beautiful who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her cold• ly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hur• riedly she felt she must cover up some fault in her• self. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and In her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard lit• tle place that could not feel love, no, not for any• body. Everybody else said of her: "She is such a good mother. She adores her children." Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other's eyes. Aside from the intention to indicate the story's subsequent tone, I quote at length in order (a) to illustrate the per• version of archetypal mother love for offspring (which leads, in turn, to the perversion of the archetypal quest by son to regain it); and (b) to suggest the extent of the mother's hypocrisy which requires a facade to hide her loss of a once propitious life. This last creates the phantas• magoric rasping of the house as the mother seeks to regains that life which costs both money and, in the end, her son's life. 7k In declaiming "The Rocking-Horse Winner," Leavis in• sinuates that the story portrays something of a freak in Lawrence's canon because it is hardly representative. He does not recognize that this story approximates the author's interest in a particular structure which, as indicated earlier, increasingly attracted him in his later years. That the subject matter appears superficially to deal with childhood, in no way detracts from the story's nuclear place among the shorter fiction that here pursues the quest theme by means of similar characteristics. It is true that dialogue usurpts all but a modicum of narration, but given this difference the story delineates the same unsuccessful quest as those other Whole Stories so far discussed. Like "The Princess," the story of Paul and his horse falls more to the side of fairy-tale than to parable, of which the overt didacticism of "The Man Who Loved Islands" is the best example. The paragraph quoted above connotes the rhythm and imagery of a fairy-tale unfolding, while the rest of the story pursues the magical nature of that particular form. Of course such phrases as "At last," "And so," "One day," "And then," are not exclusively a province of the fairy-tale—as we saw by similar sharp linear connections in "The Man Who Loved Islands"—but they do contribute to Paul's apprenticeship and his pursuit of the money grail. Prom his mother, Paul gradually learns that his family's 75 poverty has supposedly resulted from his luckless father. In response to his inquiry, the mother replies that luck is not money but rather what "causes you to have money." For all its crass undertones her definition carries a cer• tain logic: "If you're rich, you may lose your money. But if you're lucky, you will always get more money." Although she is unable to explain the sporadic appearance of luck, this does not prevent her son from Initiating his quest to locate luck for her. "He went off by himself," states Law• rence, "vaguely, in a childish way, seeking for the clue to 'luck'." Presumably its discovery will bring happiness to his mother, thereby uncovering her lost love of family. Paul's quest acquires frenetic overtones, quite unlike the spontaneity which characterizes the traditional knightly search that rambles often into idyll. On his rocking-horse, he plunges "madly into space" In a delirium that unnerves his younger sisters. His is a "mad little journey" ruled by a "mechanical gallop," which conveys a forced, synthetic quest—the sort required In a modern world where luck (in terms of money) lacks all Idealism. That his uncle calls him a "young romancer" Implies the man's naivete concerning both the nature and Importance of the boy's search: not un• til Paul wins himself twelve hundred pounds by correctly pre• dicting the Lincoln horse race (Ironic, as far as the quest motif goes, that his choice beats another named Lancelot), 76 does the uncle begin to take him seriously. And while the gardener attributes the boy's luck to heaven and the super• natural, the uncle, in his summation of the tale, negates the first by unconsciously implicating the devil. The time lapse in the story remains unspecified, but Intimates the transition from childhood to adolescence--at which age Paul gains a tutor, but must sneak off to ride his rocking-horse. The Whole Story, of course, allows for this speedy transition and gains its effect from the technique. The key linear transition occurs after Paul has anonymously signed over five thousand pounds to his mother, thus hoping to appease the demonic whispering which is destroying him: "Then," Lawrence writes, "something very curious happened. The voices In the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening." Because the mother has not spared a pound of her "inheritance," the boy quickly dis• covers himself in a worse predicament than ever; instead of meriting him a closer relationship with his mother, his quest has nurtured merely a greater alienation, which now threatens fragmentation. He becomes "wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him." This results from a sudden inability to predict winning horses, and In• stead of capitalizing, he loses one hundred and fifty pounds. Consequently, as the Derby approaches, the story nears its climax. 77 At a party, meanwhile, the mother experiences "rushes of anxiety about her boy," but when she telephones home the gover• ness reassures her. Only after she returns does she uncover the source of her anxiety by tracing a queer rushing sound to the noise of her son "madly surging on his rocking-horse." His sudden scream, "It's Malabar'.", and his plunge Into un• consciousness, seem to crystallize his overwhelming desire for love—which the mother appears instinctively to recog• nize in "all her tormented motherhood." But her curious non- committance as the boy nears death—"feeling her heart had gone, turned actually Into a stone"—implies that such a motherhood finds its source not In any sudden remorse, but in the impulsive nature of her hypocrisy (as the story's opening paragraph makes clear). Unable to realize the ex• tent of her own duplicity, she cannot console the boy with anything but a rather remote sentence when he does regain consciousness to hear he has won an enormous sum on the Derby. Not even the uncle, who earlier confesses to an awareness of the haunted voices, seems able now to intuit the root of the evil—although (as mentioned above) he un• wittingly fingers the demonic. "My God, Hester, you're eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner•" 78 His words sum up the story in an archetypal resume, as one critic calls it "the statement of the moral appended in the h form of a proverb," but the uncle's effort to perceive some• thing positive in the death echoes dully and with little meaning. What emerges, therefore, is the negation of Paul's quest for wholeness within the domestic world of the perverted fairy-tale. That last phrase might effectively describe "The Princess." Like "The Rocking-Horse Winner," this story derives its Im• petus from a structure informed by mythological overtones, although its working-out generally eventuates away from these into naturalism. In this respect the story differs from "The Woman Who Rode Away," where naturalism turns increasingly to myth. In "The Princess," Lawrence introduces his pivotal charac• ter as a possessor of two names, Mary Urquhart, her real, and the Princess, her make-believe. This duality, of course, sug• gests more than mere nomalism; it foreshadows the character's very real struggle between the world as she experiences it, and the world as she imagines it to be: the struggle in which she refuses to accept reality in her preference for the child• ish vision she never overcomes. In his attempt to emphasize her anachronism, Lawrence prefers to call her the Princess throughout the story. Like Egbert, therefore, she remains a mythic figure to the end, pursuing only half-heartedly the 79 wholeness that seems hers by a tradition which the modern world now threatens to dispense with. Her inability to reach wholeness in the natural world, moreover, connotes the same inability of Egbert to interact with others in the natural world at Crockham. But while Egbert acquires a self-indulgent solace within the natural cosmos, the Princess discovers only degradation, and in this respect resembles the islander who also refuses to face reality. Upon a first reading, "The Princess" may not appear particularly extensive in terms of elapsed time; after all, the story's central events (the ride into the mountains, the seduction, and Romero's death) occur within a matter of days. Ye't the linear perspective is more significant than that. The structure functions in a manner which includes an ac• count of the main character's whole life—from her birth to the traditional happily-ever-after (ironic here)—and this account has more than gratuitous importance. For the first seven pages, Lawrence does nothing else but provide us back• ground detail on the Princess, In order that It remains the priority in our understanding of her refusal to face the world and reality. He describes her father as "a bit mad," one who claims royal descent, and who resembles "some old Celtic hero": speaking with a voice "direct out of the hushed Ossianic past," her father avoids "decisive connection" by journeying "vaguely about, never arriving anywhere, never 80 doing anything, and never definitely being anything." Only when the mother "suddenly" dies, does the story's fairy-tale gentility receive its first jolt, and the two-year-old daughter reverts exclusively to the wandering father. With him life for the Princess is an endless and point• less journey between countries. Yet it does not lack "the royal touch" because, as Urquhart explains to her in a long sermon, "only you are royal, after me. Always remember that. And always remember, it is a great secret." Thus from his perversity she acquires an "assured touch of condescension," which unfortunately permits her to view life merely "from the outside." Consequently her perception is both second• hand and unreal: she knows "all about" a Roman cabman, for example, because she has read of him in Zola. And never do her increasing years presuppose clear-sightedness, because the aura of illusion that has become her life prevents any sort of conventional maturity. The years elapse "impercep• tibly," and she retains the undiminished "quality of the sexless fairies." What the first seven pages of "The Princess" do, then, is organize the reader's perception of events to follow in the natural world, by constructing an archetypal microcosm which serves to frame the heroine's subsequent behavior. In this Whole Story, moreover, we understand the character's two-dimensional attitude to reality through an actual frame 81 Image, Near the beginning of the story Lawrence writes: "She looked as if she had stepped oat of a picture. But no one, to her dying day, ever knew exactly the strange picture her father had framed her in and from which she never stepped," No one, of course, but the reader knows the picture, and while this image aniticipates the later reference to her face "modelled with an arched nose like a proud old Florentine portrait," and her gazing "sardon• ically ... out on a princeless world," it also looks for• ward to the concluding sentence which frames the story it• self, as the Princess retreats into a picture of illusory happiness: "Later, she married an elderly man, and seemed pleased." Such a picture bespeaks an unsuccessful quest for wholeness--in Lawrence's hands the conclusion of a modern fairy-tale where extensions of space and time mould their own distinctive structure. If the opening pages of "The Princess" serve to des• cribe the very extraordinary nature of its heroine (or anti- heroine), those of "The Woman Who Rode Away" help to es• tablish its character as a more usual Individual—a house• wife dissatisfied that her marriage has fallen short of the "adventure" she once expected. Her conscious development had stopped mysteriously with her marriage, completely arrested. Her husband had never become real to her, neither mentally nor 82 physically. In spite of his late sort of passion for her, he never meant anything to her physically. Obviously, this woman's quest for wholeness presupposes a search for the reality deficient in her present existence, a quest leading to the adventure which has never actualized in marriage. Only after this housewife journeys away from her domineering husband does she assume qualities indigenous to the universal character of the Whole Story. Like the is• lander, however, she moves into a mythological world where idyllic promise turns increasingly to illusion. Completely perverted, her search for reality casts off family respon• sibility, choosing instead an alien culture whose ritualistic 5 life Isolates her in a way she has never been by her husband. The decadent attraction of this slavery twists her concept of freedom, so that instead of reacting against death (as does the character in "The Man Who Died"), she accepts it ir• revocably and without struggle, like Egbert. Hence, the un• successful quest inevitably misjudges reality by settling perversely for a misdirected route: this woman, Lawrence de• clares, "was overcome by a foolish romanticism more unreal than a girl's. She felt it was her destiny to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians of the mountains." In his concern to include as much biographical background as necessary, the author fashions his characteristic linear and spatial extensions. Such phrases as "so the years went 83 by," assist in fashioning the duration of the woman's in• sufferable marriage; and the mention of a three month trip from Mexico to the United States, helps to show how spatial change cannot cure the woman's psyche when her husband In• sists on accompanying and maintaining "his spell over her.1* But Instead of establishing the woman as "ageless" or "time• less"—words used to describe the Princess In the beginning of that story--here the archetypal nature of the heroine is fixed later in the story. In the Shangrala where she remains captive of the Chil- chui Indians, "The days and the weeks went by," writes Law• rence, "in a Vague kind of contentment." At the same time there occur a number of passages which relate in meticulous detail the woman's heightened sensitivity as a result of her drug-induced observation. For all her awareness, however, the woman's cosmic consciousness is basically a negative one, because she resembles little more than a guinea pig for the Chilchui who seek only to destroy her; with their drugs they hope to fatten her identity in order to murder it. Her kind of womanhood, Intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval sym• bols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of women. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the great stream of impersonal sex and im• personal passion. Thus this nameless woman becomes for the Chilchui the archety- 81+ pal white woman; but instead of acquiring wholeness through her independent quest, she discovers that the primitive world holds out no less a mechanical subjugation than the one she has escaped. In fact, here it is more debilitating because she loses all inclination to resist her fate, sensing in the negative social consciousness, of which Lawrence writes else• where j an attraction. Characteristic of the Whole Story's denial of naturalism, use of the "primeval symbols" becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses toward its apocalyptic impact. Yet ob• viousness of use does not presume an Inherent weakness of 6 story, so that when the old priest raises his knife to stab the woman in the final scene, the symbols of ice shaft, sun, and cave, strangely excite in a way as original as any more subtle one in modern short fiction. For Lawrence the tran• scendence of naturalism appears the means of raining aestheti- cism from worn archetypal symbols. But even more importantly, we must understand that he moulds that aestheticism into his own characteristic structure. II The Successful Quest In the novella, "The Man Who Died," Lawrence offers his own concept of what Christ's Resurrection might more profitably 85 have turned Into, a quest by ascetic man for a full sensual life—provided finally by the woman of Isis whose own quest to find and reassemble the fragmented Osiris by sexual inter• action, gradually achieves the place the writer believed it rightly deserved in the Christian scheme (Apocalypse)—as the natural world becomes harmonious with the central character. At least for himself, Lawrence appears to have balanced the cosmos by achieving an equilibrium between the present and the past, history and myth, conscious and unconscious^ man and woman. Excesses on either side seem resolved by his character who acts as a fulcrum, yet who also recognizes the precariousness of this balance in the end, by casting off upon the ocean to avoid betrayal, promising to come again. Because Christ's life and Crucifixion are well known, the structure of "The Man Who Died" presupposes the reader's awareness of events and therefore eliminates the Whole Story's background material, which usually aims at creating an archety• pal category for character. Instead, Part I concentrates on acquainting us with a peasant and a cock, which becomes the symbol of the risen man who died (the original title for Lawrence's mythological account was a sexual pun, "The Escaped Cock"). There was a peasant near Jerusalem who acquired a young gamecock which looked a shabby little thing, but which put on brave feathers as spring advanced, and was resplendent with arched and orange neck by the time the fig-trees were letting out leaves from their end-tips. 86 So the story begins; the parabolic tone creates a particular mood, and the linear and spatial extensions working backwards to the archetypal city of Jerusalem, establish a framework in which events acquire a deliberate perspective. Also, the opening sentence is important for its brief account of the natural regenerative process that describes the triumph of spring over the cock's winter-dead appearance: the story which follows recounts essentially the same event, empha• sizing the man who died rather than the bird. Although al• ways explicit, the symbol is tastefully drawn; the bird it• self possesses life, vitality, sexual desire, and ful• fillment—everything the man lacks initially, but gains as his moribund pallor and Its affinity with the tomb, gradually change places with a healthy countenance and a rapport with the natural world. At the beginning of Part I the cock—"a saucy, flam• boyant bird," "good for twenty hens"—suffers the indignity of a tether which its owner fastens about its leg to prevent escape. Thus tied, the bird, writes Lawrence, "no longer pranced and ruffled and forged his feathers": its "body, soul and spirit were tied by that string." One morning, however, the cock leaps forward, breaks the string, and escapes. Thus the succeeding scene gains in impact with the carefully executed counterpoint: At the same time, at the same hour before dawn, on 87 the same morning, a man awoke from a long sleep in which he was tied up. He woke numb and cold, in• side a carved hole in the rock. Through all the long sleep his body had been full of hurt, and it was still full of hurt. He did not open his eyes. Yet he knew that he was awake, and numb, and cold, and rigid, and full of hurt, and tied up. His face was banded with cold bands, his legs were bandaged together. Only his hands were loose. While the repetition here of "hurt" grates a little, Lawrence proceeds to record in precise detail how the Christ figure struggles upward, his bandages fall away, and how he emerges from his "lair" into the dawn—yet "filled still with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion." As the man turns from the city to follow the road into "the natural world," he encounters, as a matter of course, the escaping cock which rouses him from "a kind of half-consciousness" with its cry. Responding to the peasant's request for aid, the man spreads "his great white wings of a shroud" (another obvious linking image), and the bird is captured. Thus bird and character come together, and for the rest of Part I we observe the vigouous cock through the languid eyes of the protagonist; only after the bird obtains its freedom does the man procure the same freedom himself. Part I accents individualism, the condition which Law• rence views in Apocalypse as anithetical both to love and a sense of wholeness or rapport with the cosmos. Although the central character takes up residence with the peasant 88 and his wife, for example, he never achieves any sort of community with them because he has none with himself; he suffers acute social consciousness because awareness of his own separate existence allows him no interaction with those whom he encounters. Not even the sensuous Madeline will he suffer to touch him: "Now I belong to no one and have no.*connectIon, and mission or gospel Is gone from me,"1 he tells her. Morosely he indulges himself in the fatuity of his former life, and claims that he must ascend to the Father In order to regain the flesh and be healed. But instead he decides to "set out into the phenomenal world, to be fulfilled In his own loneliness in the midst of it. For previously he had been too much mixed up in it." He assumes the role of physician ("because the power was still in him to heal any man or child who touched his compassion"), purchases the peasant's cock, and sets out Into the world seeking regeneration. And before the conclusion of Part I, he deposits the bird among a "kingdom" of hens, symbolically clearing the way for his own resurrection to a similar physical heaven of wholeness and peace. 7 In his essay "The Risen Lord," Lawrence declares that of the three images of Christ, the Christian Churches stress only the first two—Christ-child and Christ Crucified—to the exclusion of Christ Risen. He argues that the first two "are 89 both untrue to the Inner experience and feeling of the young'1 who do not share their elders' acceptance of the traditional limiting images. "Now," he states, "man cannot live without some vision of himself"; and if man's function is regeneration then the Risen Lord should be preached. Christ risen in the fleshl We must accept the Image complete, if we accept it at all. We must take the mystery in its fulness and in fact. It is only the Image of our own experience. Christ rises, when He rises from the dead, in the flesh, not merely as spirit. He rises with hands and feet, as Thomas knew for certain: and if with hands and feet, then with lips and stomach and genitals of a man. Christ risen, and risen in the whole of His flesh, not with some left out. Thus the direction of "The Man Who Died" pursues the theme of wholeness, from the individualism of Part I, to the in• tegration with woman in Part II. The second section opens with a spatial shift to the Mediterranean shoreline. The first paragraph introduces the woman of Isis in Search, amidst a natural world still in winter. Pictorially, the scene is lovely, a splendid setting for the ritualized encounter to follow, the winter chill ap• parently no encumberance to the loin-clothed slave who beats his companion, then copulates with her on a smooth rock as the womasjdf?Isis looks on. This scene, also witnessed by the man who died, serves a dual purpose: it brings the two principal characters together for the first time, and it 90 presages their own sexual intercourse subsequently in the temple. The brutality and animalism of the present scene seems a deliberate attempt on Lawrence's part to heighten the sensitive and voluntary nature of the later Intercourse. And while the humiliation which the slave boy experiences when made conscious of his deed contrasts with the subsequent pride of the man who died, so the Indifference of the slave girl differs from her mistress's enthusiasm for her inter• course with the man she believes the wandering Osiris. Perhaps because the mythical woman of Isis is less known than the Christ figure, Lawrence takes care to sketch her background by explaining her quest "for the fragments of the dead Osiris, dead and scattered asunder, dead, torn apart, and thrown in fragments over the wide world." An archetypal figure, she seeks wholeness—rather like the woman who rode away—as "the womb which waits submerged and in bud, waits for the touch of that other inward sun that streams its rays from the loins of the male Osiris." But unlike her apparent counterpart, the woman of Isis suffers neither degradation nor death. Meanwhile the man takes up residence in a small cave, a "lair" not unlike the one he escaped. But it is the temple which demands his attention, also the woman who has propositioned him with rebirth. By deciding, finally, that "unless we encompass" everyday life "in the circle of the 91 greater life, all is disaster," he overcomes his reluctance and accepts the overtures of this woman, and encounters another "dawn, a new sun" through their stylised, yet spon• taneous interaction, "So the days came," Lawrence records (seeking the typical linear extension of the Whole Story which lends archetypal perspective), "and the nights came, and days came again, and the contact was perfected and ful• filled," And appropriately, the natural world resurrects itself from the deadness of winter when the man is In the '"fulness of touch": Plum-blossom blew from the trees, the time of the narcissus was past, anemones lit up the ground and were gone, the perfume of bean-field was in the air. All changed, the blossom of the universe changed Its petals and swung round to look another way. The spring was fulfilled, a contact was es• tablished, the man and woman were fulfilled of one another, and departure was in the air. The man's departure occurs when his confidence in the promise of the pregnant woman allows him to set out to sea in order to avoid capture as an "escaped malefactor." "I have sowed the seed of my life and my resurrection, and put my touch forever upon the choice woman of this day, and I carry her perfume in my flesh like essence of roses. She is dear to me in the middle of my being. But the gold and flowing serpent is coiling up again, to sleep at the root of my tree," "So let the boat carry me. Tomorrow is another day. The suggestion in these final lines of good and evil, time and 92 place, emphasizes the cyclical rhythm of the natural world, and the continuing nature of the human quest. That a possibility of evil remains to disrupt acquired wholeness, appears in• evitably the human experience—as this most archetypal chara- ter of all the Whole Stories (Christ-Osiris-Ulysses*Pan-even Lawrence himself) delights nonetheless in the challenge of a new humanity. Like the dther Whole Stories (apart from "Things"), this novella is striking and original because it creates an archety• pal character, and utilizes a particular extension of space and time for an apocalyptic effect which arises from the quest for wholeness. And while the term concocted to describe these particular works;remains less than felicitious, it does cauterize them in a manner which not only indicates their inherent structur al aesthetic, but demonstrates Lawrence's unmistakable origin• ality in modern short fiction. FOOTNOTES 1 Lawrence's words about a particular way of life on the island of Sardinia, call to mind the islander: "One feels for the first time the real old mediaeval life, which is en• closed in itself and has no interest in the world outside." Seaoand Sardinia, p. 90. 2 As naturalism is denied in the Whole Story, the use of symbolism becomes overt (suggested earlier). Hence in this story, as the natural world assumes an ominous archetypal quality, Lawrence purposely makes obvious that occurence. This obviousness, also observable in "The Woman Who Rode Away" for example, relates to Eugene Goodheart's contention that Lawrence ''tends toward the making of swift symbolic con• densations of facts and experiences, which the novelist is generally at pains to present in careful detail. For this reason, Lawrence's shorter works ... offer his symbolic and mythic imagination a greater opportunity to perform its prophetic-visionary role." The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 19~S"3), p. 62. 3 F. R. Leavis, Dj_ Hj_ Lawrence: Novelist,, p. 371. k Frank Amon, "D. H. Lawrence and the Short Story," The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, p. 232. 5 As Lawrence writes elsewhere: "in the religion of aboriginal America, there is no Father, and no Maker. There is the great living source of life: say the Sun of existence: to which you can no more pray than you can pray to Electricity. And emerging from this Sun are the great potencies, the in• vincible Influences which make shine and warmth and rain. From these great interrelated potencies of rain and heat and thunder emerge the seeds of life itself, corn, and creatures like snakes. And beyond these, men, persons. But all emerge separately. There is no oneness, no sympathetic identifying oneself with the rest. The law of isolation is heavy on every creature." Mornings in Mexico (William Heinemann Ltd.: London, 1956), p. 6ii. 9k 6 About the "constitutive" symbol Eliseo Vivas writes that it is "in the last analysis beyond elucidation by dis• cursive language." He states that "the nature of the cons• titutive symbol is easily grasped ... in powerful construct• ions like 'The Rocking-Horse Winner'7 and ,;The Woman Who Rode Away!." (281) "Were a philosopher to ask me what I mean by the term, 'constitutive symbol,' I would answer that the constitutive symbol is a creative synthesis of empirical matter which manifests itself in dramatic and moral terms and which functions categorically. But I would emphasize . the words 'creative' and 'synthesis.' For the constitutive symbol is not arrived at by a mere reshuffling or rear• ranging of the matter of experience. It is creative and it is a genuine synthesis." (275) Lawrence; The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, I960). Phoenix II. pp. 571-577. CHAPTER III IMAGERY Triangle Versus the Individual Consciousness Especially important In an understanding of any writer's art is his structural Imagery, for that provides a way of viewing the shaping patterns of his vision. In• deed, as opposed to the many concrete images that arise only once in Lawrence's shorter fiction (eg. the rocking- horse, the ladybird, the blue mocassins, the captain's doll, the fox), his structural Images (which are few) re• cur again and again, thereby suggesting themselves as standard moulds within which character interaction might profitably be observed. Two structural images partic• ularly pertinent in looking at Lawrence's stories and novellas are the family and the triangle. As a medium of discussion the first has attracted critics to such pieces as "Daughters of the Vicar," "You Touched Me," "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," "Odour of Chrysanthemums," and others. The triangle, on the other hand, has stimu• lated less critical attention as a means of approaching the stories, certainly strange because at least twenty- five of them employ this image, observedly more than the family. By family I mean parents and children, of course, not husband and wife who generally find themselves in• volved within a triangle, though the image does not limit itself to married couples. Biographically, it might be argued that while Law• rence's early background contributes to the reappearing family image, his later experience in winning for him• self another man's wife suggests the triangle and its variations. The case for the last, however, while prob• ably one reason for the continuing recurrence of this structural image through subsequent years, does not take Into account those few stories written before 1912, the ones which feature the triangle. In any event, this image recommends itself for use in a study of the quest theme, for behind it lies social consciousness and antip• athy for wholeness uor harmony. Wholeness, as I proposed in the Introduction, is synonymous with Lawrence's con• tinuum of Individual consciousness--what the triangle in• evitably opposes because such a situation signifies a social contrivance. Ideally, the quest for wholeness reaches a fulfillment in a collapse of the triangle and the union of two individuals. Yet as often as not the quest fails, so that despite the transmutation of the triangle image, as in "The Pox," the final couple remains disharmonious• Chronologically the triangle stories run through the 97 early "Goose Pair" (1909), to the late "The Blue Mocassins" (1929). Among the early stories featuring the triangle are "A Modern Lover," "The Old Adam," "New Eve and Old Adam," "Shadow In the Rose Garden," and "The Shades of Spring." In the last, Lawrence skilfully evokes a pastoral setting into which Syson returns to visit his former sweetheart whom he has not seen for some years. Although he has con• tinued to send her books of verse, their supposedly spirit• ual relationship has not prevented Syson from marrying in the Interim, nor Hilda from taking the gamekeeper for a lover. The triangle image acquires shape when the in• truder loses his humor in conversation with the keeper about Hilda. Not only does Syson1s education contrast markedly with Pilbean's physical presence, but also with Hilda's family, who do not trouble to hide their distaste for his refinement which causes them uneasiness and a measure of Inferiority. This pernicious social conscious• ness also plagues the chance of any redemption, between Syson and Hilda, of their original relationship. If the intruder intends such a redemption by his re• turn, however, Hilda quickly discourages it by informing him that she does not approve of what he has become. Moreover, she makes a point of emphasizing the wholeness she has ac• quired in his absence. They visit Pilbean's primitive log hut where we see Hilda in an instinctive, natural environ- 98 merit. Here she announces to Syson that while he once re• tarded her "separate existence," in effect removing her from her essential self with his bullying, now she no longer needs him. Consequently, Syson realizes that Hilda is hardly "his Botticelli angel," the "Beatrice" he has come to idealize in his absence. Thus he (not she, as Widmer infers), experiences a sense of loss in the concluding scene of the story, when the triangle achieves Its best effect as the departing Syson—who has decided to drop all correspondence with the girl—ac- cidently witnesses her and the keeper making love. What Widmer fails to account for is the debilitat• ing social consciousness of Syson, when he claims Hilda's final lover "apparently of the second-best sort that Law- 1 rence touches on in so many stories." He has obviously mistaken Hilda's reluctance to marry Pilbean as concom• itant with a sense of loss, which it is not: nowhere in the story does Lawrence suggest that the girl has not be• come more herself, nor less conscious of separation from an individual consciousness, as a result of a natural set• ting and Syson's absence. And she has no intention of spoiling her harmonious rapport with this world by risking matrimonial subjugation. Therefore, she and Pilbean will continue their spontaneous relationship^ he fulfilling her better than any second-best lover. 99 "Love Among the Haystacks," another early story, again couples the structural image of the triangle and a pastoral setting. Here the two rivals are brothers and the cause of their rivalry a Polish governess, Paula Jablonowsky, who stirs in the younger suitor memory of his previous night's experience with her. As the two men work beside each other stacking hay, it becomes clear that the slightly older Geoffrey resents his brother's success, especially when Paula seemed originally to prefer himself. Maurice, of course, does not hesitate to rub in his own good fortune, so that when Paula takes a seat on the fence to watch the haying, Geoffrey understandably seizes the opportunity to work in a way which causes his nemesis to sweat and fall behind. Eventually the "bed" of hay be• comes a battleground where, "like opposing bulls," the brothers confront each other and struggle^ until Maurice loses his footing and topples to the ground unconscious. Instead of alleviating Geoffrey's frustration, however, the fall serves merely to exacerbate It, as Paula rushes to Maurice's aid full of sympathy for the wounded brother, and accusations for the other. Described "as a wild cat," the governess indulges Maurice who struggles handsomely to his feet with "a strange new ease." What gives this story a freshness and ultimate balance Is the introduction of another woman with whom Geoffrey later falls in love; from the triangular situation in the early 100 stages, the story progresses toward a final structural Image that is square--where wholeness appears the achieve• ment of at least one of the couples. This movement com• mences in Part II when an obnoxious tramp breaks in upon the harvesters at their lunch, requesting food. His wife also approaches, and in the ensuing scene Geoffrey senses a "kinship" between himself and this woman "at odds with the world" and her husband. Immediately we sense a new triangle arising, but one that quickly dissolves as the couple presumably disappears. In Part III Geoffrey's loneliness to which Lawrence earlier alludes, receives a fuller treatment when he con• trasts it to Maurice's happiness later in the afternoon. But Geoffrey was still sullenly hostile to the mo3t part of the world. He felt isolated. The free and easy inter-communication between the other workers left him distinctly alone. And he was a man who could not bear to stand alone, he was too much afraid of the vast confusion of life surrounding him in which he was helpless. Geoffrey mistrusted himself with everybody. This lack of connection or wholeness for the virginal Geoffrey becomes acute in Part TV when he overhears Paula and his brother atop one of the haystacks preparing to make love in the darkness. Suddenly "very miserable, and jealous of Maurice" he retreats to the tool shed to escape the rain, leaving the lovers beneath a canvas covering. 101 In the shed he surprises a woman seeking shelter, the one who has earlier accompanied her tramp husband, begging food from the harvesters. Now he offers her both food and warmth. Despite the four years of "unalleviated shame and degrada• tion" that has caused her "loneliness," and a nature "caked and sterile," the woman softens to Geoffrey's touch; and in their subsequent lovemaking the young man reaches a fulness never before experienced: "With her to complete him, to form the core of him," Lawrence writes, "he was firm and whole." As a result of their union, connotations of the original triangle which saw Geoffrey the suffering outsider, are broken—although the same image receives a last glance when the older brother once more overhears Maurice and Paula the next morning. But this time the older brother senses no attraction for the Polish girl, Indeed he feels rather con• temptuous of her: while the tramp woman appears "neat and pretty," Paula looks "white-faced" with pieces of hay sticking In her hair. As the four lovers squat around a fire, the structural image of the triangle has become a square, each couple com• plementing the other. And while the story ends with a promise of marriage between Maurice and Paula, it also concludes with the simple but forceful statement that Geoffrey and Lydla continue to keep faith, "one with the other." Since Law• rence has spent considerably more time detailing the actual 102 love between the second couple, it seems that he regards that relationship as the more fulfilling and satisfactory. Geoffrey has achieved a condition of wholeness which Maurice has never apparently lacked, and for that reason the resolu• tion of the triangle proves an integral and successful res• ponse to the older brother's quest, rather than a simple affirmation of the younger's affair. Certainly a key structural image in this story, the triangle assumes a new shape whose harmonious juxtaposition of two couples results in a happy ending reminiscent of a Restoration play. With "The Blind Man" (1918) the triangle image becomes an extremely powerful structural image, one that develops to an important degree the intellectual-versus-instinctive-man opposition which appears in the early stories, but receives more intense treatment here and in later works like "The Ladybird" and "The Border Line." With the opening paragraph the triangle begins immediately to assume shape. Isabel Pervin was listening for two sounds—for the sound of wheels on the drive outside and for the noise of her husband's footsteps in the hall. Her dearest and oldest friend, a man who seemed almost indispens• able to her living, would drive up in the rainy dusk of the closing November day. The trap had gone to fetch him from the station. And her husband, who had been blinded in Flanders, and who had a disfigur• ing mark on his brow, would be coming in from the out-house. The blind man, we soon discover, possesses those charac- 103 teristics (naivete, innocence, at-oneneaa) which allow him a wholeness of living in the simple rural setting of his farm; here despite his handicap, he experiences a living continuum with what surrounds him. He milked the cows, carried in the pails, turned the separator, attended to the pigs and horses. Life was still very full and strangly serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost Incomprehensible peace of im• mediate contact in darkness. With his wife he had a whole world, rich and real and invisible. But Lawrence is also careful to delineate the strain which has occurred periodically between Maurice and his wife. Despite Isabel's attempts to open their world to visitors, the blind man has shown little interest. Yet to the delight of his wife he has consented to a visit by Bertie Reid,"the intellectual type," ascetic and completely the antithesis of himself. For Isabel (who reviews books for a newspaper) the imminence of her old friend promises a stimulating evening for herself, and hopefully a new understanding between the two men, although they have not got along in the past. Just prior to Bertie's appearance, Lawrence offers two insights into the world of the blind man, the first drama• tized, the second stated: both anticipate the scene where Maurice touches Bertie at length in the barn. Firstly, when Isabel seeks her husband out among the horses, she gains some sense of his world of touch where she views him 10lx in a masterful role. The complete darkness which greets her in the barn is "startling," something which renders her helpless, impossible to take for granted as she earlier has with "superficial appreciation" the softly lighted dining-room. Secondly, Lawrence indicates the blind man's fulness in his dark world of individual consciousness, when he writes of his character's blood instinct. Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood- prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood- contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was a certain rich positivity, border• ing sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping lapping, and advancing, envelop• ing all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualise. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him. Although Maurice later realizes that his contempt for Bertie arises from "his own weakness," he finds it impos• sible to engage in the dinner small-talk, which serves only to intensify the awkwardness of the triangular situation for his wife and guest. But his gaucheness he wishes to mollify later in the barn, where Bertie searches him out. In his attempt to come to terms with this intruder, Maurice gains the confidence he needs to touch Bertie's skull and 105 face. In turn, he requests the lawyer to feel his scarred eye-sockets. Thus as Maurice grows stronger in what he believes a new friendship, Bertie shrinks in terror from this repugnant contact—as he has from any contact in his life. In this respect the concluding structural image within the story acquires a fresh perspective; no longer is it the blind man who seeks escape from the triangle, but rather the ascetic Bertie. Yet while the story settles successfully for Maurice, who overcomes his immediate in• security to experience the wholeness that is his by instinct (in contrast to the fragmented Bertie who loses the pros• perous appearance he is incapable of sustaining), the im• pending birth of a new member of his family suggests yet another triangular situation for the blind man to overcome. That he will triumph depends largely upon the capacity of the instinctive Lawrencian male to retain his individual consciousness; and that is likely, for the new triangle will involve an organic pattern which loses the contrived essence of the three-cornered image, thereby becoming another structural image, the sort which informs the family stories. With "The Fox" (1919-1921) the structural image of the triangle continues to play an integral part in the fibre of Lawrence's fiction, and in the consistency of his vision 106 so far as it relates to the desirability of wholeness. This story represents Lawrence's most famous novella, one whose character interaction and psychological insight has led ideally to a movie. Despite Its terribly gratuitous con• clusion, "The Pox" presses from the triangle pattern perhaps its most effective rendering among all the shorter fiction. It Is one of the few triangle stories that uses two women and one man, instead of the more usual two men and a woman. Yet that does not obscure the fact of social consciousness which intrudes with Henry, the human fox, to disrupt the qualified wholeness which Banford and March experience on their own, working the farm. The cleavage between the two women, however, hardly results from Henry's proposal to March. Rather it is the ascetic Banford, "a small, thin, delicate thing with spec• tacles," who Initiates the conflict of the story with her possessive hankering to retain the "robust" March for her own partner. Not only does the nature of their relation• ship appear unnatural due to lesbian undertones, but be• cause "things" have not turned out successfully In the operation of their farm. In this respect their condition of rural wholeness is both a qualified one, and one which invites the intrusion of a male interloper who (unlike Syson and Bertie ReId) shares with March a kind of individ- 107 ual consciousness that smacks in no way of intellectualism. Indeed, Lawrence makes clear that for March, Henry is the fox—a boy she cannot see "otherwise." Before Henry's arrival at the farm, the actual fox has so impressed it• self upon the girl's awareness—become the "master of her spirit"—that this parallel is Inevitable. March searches for the fox in order to plug a gap in her life. She still looked for him unconsciously when she went towards the wood. He had become a settled effect in her spirit, a state permanently established, not con• tinuous, but always recurring. She did not know what she felt or thought: only the state came over herf as when he looked at her. This inexplicable feeling in the presence of the fox is the same emotion that Henry Instills, one which Banford has no control over with the boy present, but one she succeeds in purging when he is absent. In short, she represents the social consciousness that makes the triangle situation pernicious to a condition of wholeness between the other couple. This social consciousness, however, does not ap• pear immediately. At first, Banford seems as amenable to Henrys! s residence as March seems indifferent. While the* bird-like Banford takes to Henry as she might to "her own young brother," in• viting him to stay on at the farm because she is "charmed by him," March chooses to remain the obscure member of the 108 triangle, a position from which she derives a short-lived wholeness. She became almost peaceful at last. He was identified with the fox—and he was here in full presence. She need not go after him any more. There in the shadow of her corner she gave herself up to a warm, relaxed peace, almost like sleep, accepting the spell that was on her. But she wished to remain hidden. She was only fully at peace whilst he forgot her, talking to Banford. Hidden in the shadow of the corner, she need not any more be divided in herself, trying to keep up two planes© of consciousness. She could at last lapse into the odour of the fox. Quite content in her obscurity, March is able to lapse into the fulness of individual consciousness, that which escapes her when Henry's marital intention becomes clear, when Ban• ford loses all fondness for the boy in her jealousy: then the ideality of the triangle quickly collapses. What "The Pox" features is a structural image that comes full-circle, from the unsatisfactory duality of Ban• ford and March--through the triangle image which operates for the bulk of the story and provides its overwhelming interest—to the final duality of March and Henry which again proves unsatisfactory. During the initial duality, the fowls from whom the women expect to make a living, refuse to lay eggs. The fox, moreover, causes further disenchantment by plundering their hen run. Lawrence anticipates the triangle and Banford's later vocal in- 109 truslons (these actually part of the triangle which call March from Henry), by having her break in upon the fox's spell when March first encounters it as she stalks the predator. We begin to sense Banford*s call as a counter• point to her friend's search for some new experience! which will take her beyond the work-a-day sphere of the farm. On the very evening Henry proposes to March, for ex• ample, Banford's call interrupts their conversation before the boy can receive an answer; but later that night when he succeeds in kissing March (foreshadowed by the latter's pain• ful dream of the fox), Banford's call does not come soon enough to prevent her friend's acceptance of the proposal. At this point the triangle image ushers in the fatal con• flict between Henry and Banford. And, significantly, the only time the structural image becomes concrete occurs the day Banford learns of the marriage arrangement, then ridicules the idea to Henry's torment. At length he got up and stalked out into the fields with the gun. He came in only at dinner-time, with the devil still in his face, but his manners became quite polite. Nobody said anything particular; they sat each one at the sharp corner of a triangle, in obstinate remoteness. In the afternoon he went( out again at once with the gun. He came in at nightfall with a rabbit and a pigeon. He stayed in all the evening, but hardly opened his mouth. He was in the devil of a temper, feeling he had been insulted. That night Henry learns the extent of Banford's posses- 110 siveness, when he overhears her criticizing up and down his uncouthness and designs to make a fool of March. He seems to win a measure of March's esteem, however, by killing the fox in the early hours of the morning, and offering her the fur. The offer incites March's second dream, this one por• tending Banford's death later in the story. But meanwhile Banford continues her campaign against Henry, and secures March "into league" with herself. The scenes which follow are dominated by the triangle image, usually with Henry a distant member of the pattern. He watches "with rage," for instance, when he observes March hasten to welcome Banford home from the market, take her parcels, and walk through the field with this slighter girl whom he detests. Yet the boy does feel "a secret bond, a secret thread" between himself and March, an intimacy which he hopes to strengthen through marriage and settlement in Canada. Hence, before he returns to his regiment, Henry extracts from March promise of a Christmas wedding; and she cannot help but fall victim to his spell which as usual excludes Banford. It was wonder which made her attend. And then she felt the deep, heavy, powerful stroke of his hearty terrible, like something from beyond. It was like something from beyond, something awful from out• side, signalling to her. And the signal paralysed her. It beat upon her very soul, and made her help• less. She forgot Jill. She could not think of:Jill any more. She could not think of her. That ter• rible signalling from outsideJ Ill But when Henry departs for the army, Banford soon regains the upper hand; the boy receives a letter from March ex• plaining that their engagement must break off because, in the long run, Jill personifies the only reality. When Henry reappears and kills Banford by felling a tree upon her, it represents his own calculated hacking- apart of the structural image that has plagued his quest for wholeness with March. That this fulfillment is not an axiomatic result of Banford*s death, in no way jilts the unsatisfactory nature of the final duality, but rather contributes to the depth that has been March's psychologi• cal dependence upon her female friend. Yet Lawrence makes sure this point is driven home by overstating his case with some dreadful metaphor which remains at odds with the relatively trim style of the rest of the story. Certainly March regrets the loss of a triangular situation (albeit contrived) that has coupled the reasoning intelligence of Banford on the one hand, and the instinctive allure of Henry on the other. With the absence of Banford, Henry no longer affords the same magic because he desires only her subjugation. With him there exists neither a sense of responsibility nor purpose, as there did with Banford. Thus, while Lawrence sees the possibility for indivi• dual consciousness, he also sees the necessity for a ba• lance between mind and body; if the blind raan-and his wife 112 suggest the potential for a whole marital relationship as a result of this balance of opposites, then March and Henry connote its antithesis as the offset of two alikes. Both are instinctive creatures shoved apart by the possessive social consciousness which Henry now evidently typifies ("He wanted to take away her consciousness, and make her just his woman")'. In the way of substitution, moreover, he appears unable to provide March with even Banford's asceticism, thus initiating her unhappiness. The conclusion of "The Pox" illustrates an example of Lawrence's endeavor to cut beneath consciousness in order to create transcending prose, but failing because its tawdry effect veers sharply away from the story's overwhelming naturalism. Conversely, the conclusion of "The Prussian Officer" succeeds with this delving-under because the sur• realistic anguish experienced by the orderly begins to build much sooner than the final scene. This second story also creates a spirit of place which becomes an excellent counterpoint to a loss of individual consciousness; and while "The Pox" approaches the same juxtaposition,.here it might well conclude. Nevertheless, "The Ladybird" (1921) has not even a = spirit of place to recommend its attempt at prose which, if not aimed toward transcendence, then certainly toward allegory in the language of Count Dionys Psanek, and to• ward shallow archetypes which involve that gentleman and Lady Daphne Apsely. This novella utilizes the triangle 113 Image, again in an effort to illustrate contrivance 'and social consciousness; but unfortunately its style makes one wish for a shorter story, perhaps none at all. The novella is largely polemic and tepidly conceived because Lawrence has not bothered to create a strong setting that remains so important to his success at fashioning character. He appears to recognize this lack of real place a few pages from the end, when he identifies the Count with the his• torical grounds of an Elizabethan manor, where he and Daphne consummate their affair; but the scene does not incorporate any of the conviction that do the farms in the four previous stories discussed earlier, or the setting of ?The7Border Line.1* At least one critic has found the long scene between the Count and Basil Apsely—discussing the nature of love— 2 "remarkable," but I for one admit to its tediousness. This scene brings both men together for the first time, well af• ter half the story has elapsed, when we begin to see the triangle actually functioning as a structural image, rather than as a nebulous inevitability. Up until now, Lawrence has concentrated on shaping the relationship between the Count, a German prisoner of war in aniiEnglish hospital, and Lady Daphne, an acquaintance from younger days who visits him while she awaits release of her own husband in Turkey. I llii But when Basil does return his wife finds him unsatisfactory, and begins "to yearn wistfully for" the Count. Through his family crest, the ladybird, Dionys traces his forefathers back to the Egyptian Pharaohs, and carves despite his smallish physical stature, an inverted world of power, darkness, and passion. Against the ascetic, "idealis• tic" Basil, therefore^ he debates for a recognition of love based on "obedience, submission, faith, belief, responsi• bility power." Basil, on the other hand, argues for the 3 Platonic ideal of love, and while he reminds us of the in• effectual Rico in "St Mawr," the aristocratic Count calls to mind Alexander Hepburn ("The Captain's Doll") who opts for the total submission of wife to husband. Yet if the Count's blood consciousness acquires the upper hand In the novella—wins Daphne's love from her cere• bral husband, and it does—one.senses that its victory re• presents a less than viable wholeness. Despite Lawrence's apparent affirmation of Dionys' instinctive aristocratic principle over Basil's intellectualized idealism, "There is," as Widmer points out, "a fundamental Incompleteness, pathos, and failure--in the worldly senses, at least—for the dark k passions, even when they win." So while Daphne's sympathies fall to her husband's arguments in the light of reason, her emotions succumb to the Count's power In the dark of passion 115 j and his bedroom. Daphne yearns "actually to cross the border" into the dark underworld where the Count will take her be• yond the social consciousness which she experiences in the daytime triangle. But the wholeness this couple seems to reach does not carry over into the light of day, and the contrivance of the triangle survives. The Count continues as Daphne's night lover and Basil, with that knowledge, her day lover. Thus Dionys* victory proves incomplete because this "master of the under-world" cannot become Daphne's full-time lover, for he has "no power in the day." It is true of course that Lawrence rarely, if ever, presents an ideal relationship between man and woman, (har• mony must, after all, arise from a perfect integration of opposites); but he does offer in some stories the potential for that harmony or wholeness (as in "The Shades of Spring" or "The Blind Man" or "Love Among the Haystacks"). In "The Ladybird," however, that potential does not exist, nor does it appear possible, for the characters collapse under the weight of too much theorizing—what the author himself preach• ed against. Although the triangle reappears in late stories1 like "The Lovely Lady" and "Mother and Daughter," I have chosen "The Border Line" (1921;) to close the present discussion of struc• tural imagery, because this story continues in the vein of 116 those earlier fictions which forcefully dichotomize the conscious and instinctive selves,Pwhile it fulfills the quest for wholeness through the collapse of the triangle and the union of husband and wife. First the dichotomy. As in l,The Ladybird," Lawrence creates two male characters, one indulgent and impulsive (Alan), the other ascetic and cerebral (Philip). But in this story the pragmatic and dominating man has red hair and blue eyes, while the idealistic and weak one assumes "the dark" appearance. The strong-willed Katherine, as a result of a marriage to the first whom she could not en• dure, has mistakenly fallen "under the spell of the dark Insidious" journalist, and married him, after her first husband goes missing in military action. She leads her• self to believe that Philip, whose "strength lies in giving In," exemplifies the reality of love—obviously because he allows her "queen-bee self" full complement— whereas Alan "asserted himself like a pillar of rock," and demanded a love sustained by masculine dominance, for her apparently an illusion. Earlier, Alan has found Philip "too much over the wrong side of the border," a side which suggests to him social consciousness and un• reality. But, naturally, Katherine has remained "blind• folded" to this, instead enjoying Philip's "cunning" 117 mechanical love which "put the scales, the balance in her hand." Despite the situation established in these intermit• tent flashbacks, the story chiefly chronicles Katherine's railway trip from Prance over the border into post-war Germany, where a nocturnal sighting of her first husband displaces the ennui she has come to feel for Philip, |and precipitates a desire to experience once again the love of Alan. Ironically, the mirage-like sighting of her first love serves merely to intensify her perception that the daytime reality of PhilipJs love has become "an Illusion." And while "The Ladybird" concludes soon after a similar point Is made, "The Border Line" carries its quest for the reality of a love seemingly dead, to an actual resolution. When Katherine finally arrives in Steinbach to take up residence with Philip, her dissatisfaction with this "whimpering little beast" takes her into the winter forest in search of her first husband. Philip, yellow and hollow, would trudge stumbling and reeling beside her: ludicrous. He was a man who never would walk firm on his legs. Now he just flopped. She could feel Alan among the trees, the thrill and vibration of him. And sometimes she would glance with beating heart at a great round fir-trunk that stood so alive and potent, so physical, bristling all its vast drooping greenness above: the snow. She could feel him, Alan, in the trees' po• tent presence. She wanted to go and press herself against the trunk. 118 This triangular Image, even without Alan's physical presence, relays itself toward a climax when Philip— sick from the cold—dies with "a ghastly grin of death" at Alan's dramatic entrance from the dead. This struc• tural image transmutes from a condition of social consc• iousness, into the wholeness of individual consciousness, when Alan (like Ulysses, It seems) ultimately draws, his wife "to the other bed, in the silent passion of a husband come back from a very long journey." With this resolution, Katherine crosses the border to the "full contentment" whose loss she earlier regretted, and submits in true Lawrencian fashion to the power of man, which expresses "her perfection and her highest attainment." No mere night lover, Alan epitomizes as fully as possible the role Lawrence expects man to assume in the wholeness of a duality. Moreover, Katherine's submission to a love resurrected from the dead, testifies to the possibility of both spiritual and physical rebirth, when love becomes the religion of the twentieth century, and individual consciousness replaces the triangle, which continues in Lawrencian imagery a contrivance. Not an outstanding story, "The Border Line" nonetheless fuses the author's ideas in a relatively subtle manner, to create interest, tension, and a coherence which arises 119 not from weary polemics, but from a structural image that owes its strength ultimately to a convincing sense of place. And if wholeness transcends setting, the quest for it does not; the search continues because human Ir• resolution demands precisely that. FOOTNOTES 1 The Art of Perversity, p. 132. 2 Monroe Engel, "The Continuity of Lawrence's Short Novels, " D_j_ Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Mark SpilkaTPrentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963), p. 96. 3 Lawrence writes in Fantasia of the Unconscious: •^Weihave fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls into one of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the South Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of the three modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant, brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of our being, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us." p. 166. The Art of Perversity, p. 1L6. CONCLUSION When Lawrence wrote well he wrote superbly, and nowhere does this talent become more evident than in the best of his shorter fiction. In the preceding discussion I have not pre• tended to canvass all of his short stories and novellas, nor have I found reason to differentiate between two often indis• tinguishable forms. "The Princess," for example, regarded as a short story, is at least as long as "The Man Who Died," in• evitably considered a novella. Moreover, Lawrence himself never drew any distinctions; instead, he discovered in his shorter fiction overall a challenge for his expansive genius which offered quicker satisfaction than the novel, at the same time requiring as much Ingenuity and precision. That he failed to meet these requirements in certain of his slighter pieces does not detract in any manner from those stories where Setting or Structure or Imagery (conventional critical routes into short fiction) reveals outstanding art: as in "The Prus• sian Officer" or "The Man Who Loved Islands" or "The Blind Man." By no means does the quest for wholeness theme affordsthe only significant approach to understanding these works, but it does provide a way of coupling Lawrence's own philosophy— where such a human pursuit counts for so much—with his shorter fiction where it reckons for so much more. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Amon, Frank. "D. H. Lawrence and the Short Story," The Achievement of H. Lawrence, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1953. Bates, H. E. 'The Modern Short Story. The Writer, Inc.: Boston, 19kl. Draper, Ronald P. D^ H. Lawrence. Twayne Publishers, Inc.: New York, 19o\. Engel, Monroe. "The Continuity of Lawrence's Short Novels," D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Spilka. Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963. Ford, George H. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and - Stories, of D. IU Lawrence. Holt, Rinehart and Winston* New York, 196~5. Goodhear£, Eugene. The Utopian Vision of Di H, Lawrence. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1963. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D, E. Lawrence. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.: London, 195>6". Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. The Viking Press: New York, I960. . The Complete Short Stories. 3 Vols. The Viking Press, Inc.: New York, 1961. . Four Short Novels. The Viking Press: New York, 1965. 123 • The Man Who Died. Martin Seeker Ltd.: London, 1931. . Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places. Wil• liam Heinemann Ltd.: London, 1956. • Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Law• rence. William Heinemann Ltd.: London, 1936". . Phoenix II: Uncollected. Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. IL Lawrence. William Heinemann Ltd.: London, 19~6~8. . Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. The Viking Press: New York, I960. . St Mawr and The Virgin and the Gipsy. Penquin Books Ltd.: Harmondsworth, 1950• . Sea and Sardinia. William Heinemann Ltd.: Lon• don, 1956. . Twilight in Italy. William Heinemann Ltd.: London", 1916. Leavis, F. R. D_j_ H. Lawrence: Novelist. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1956T Lindsay, Jack. "The Impact of Modernism on Lawrence," Paintings of L Lawrence, ed. Mervyn Levy. Cory, Adams & Mackay: London, 1961j.. Moyriahan, Julian. The Deed of Life: The Novels and the Tales of D»_ H. Lawrence. ""Princeton University Press: Princeton, 196~3. O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice. Bantam Books, Inc. New York, 1965T" 124 Read, Herbert. "Lawrence as a Painter," Paintings of D. H. Lawrence., ed. Mervyn Levy. Cory, Adams & Mackay: London, 1964 • Sagar, Keith. The Art of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge Univer• sity Press, 19557 Schorer, Mark. "Lawrence and the Spirit of Place," AD. H_. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 195>9» Tedlock, E. W. Jr. D. H. Lawrence: Artist & Rebel. The University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1963. Vivas, Eliseo. H.. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, I960. Widmer, Kingsley. The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence's Shorter Fictions. University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1962.